THE ABC OF 
NATIONAL DEFENSE 



■ ■ J. W. MULLEFL 



■ ■ 












Book t II j 



/ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



THE A-B-C OF 
NATIONAL DEFENSE 



THE A-B-C OF 
NATIONAL DEFENSE 



WHAT THE ARMY AND NAVY 
WOULD HAVE TO DO IN WAR, 
WHY THEY WOULD HAVE TO 
DO IT, AND WHAT THEY NEED 
FOR SUCCESSFUL PERFORMANCE 



BY 
J. W. MULLER 

AUTHOR OF "THE INVASION OF AMERICA' 



NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 






Copyright, 1015, by 
J. W. MULLER 

Copyright, 1915, by 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 






li 

DEC 13 1915 

©CI.A416848 

Ho 



<D 



£2 



CONTENTS 



"X, I. Trained Men Our Most Urgent 

Need 1 

II. Our Three Lines of Protection . 8 

III. The Value of the Fleet as the First 

Line 14 

IV. Congress and Shipbuilding Legisla- 

tion 20 

V. What a "Symmetrical" Fleet Should 

Be 27 

VI. The Real Situation 33 

VII. What Battleships Cannot Do . . 39 

VIII. The Destroyer — Next in Value to 

the Dreadnaught 46 

IX. The Battleship's Only Sure De- 
fense against Submarine Attack . 53 

X. Submarines — The New Weapon . . 59 

XI. Imperfections of the Submarine . 67 

XII. Battle Cruisers — The Newest Type 

of Capital Ship 74 

XIII. Cessation of Meddling by Congress 

the First Need of the Navy . . 80 

XIV. The Navy a Creature without a 

Head 88 



CONTENTS 

XV. The Navy's Actual Shortage in 

Ships . . 95 

XVI. What the United States Harbor 

Defenses Are 101 

XVII. Why the Harbor Works Can Be 

Taken from the Back .... 108 

XVIII. Harbor Defenses in Action . . . 116 

XIX. Soldiers of the Shore — Coast Ar- 
tillery 122 

XX. How a Harbor Defense Is Attacked 130 

XXI. What the Harbor Defense System 

Lacks 137 

XXII. The Mobile Army— What It Is . . 144 

XXIII. Army Posts and Why They Stand in 

the Way of Improvement . . . 152 

XXIV. Can the Army Be Made Ready for 

War under the Army Post System? 160 

XXV. What Army Experts Want ... 167 

XXVI. The Army Division— Why It Is an 

Effective Fighting Formation . 174 

XXVII. Why the "Peace Strength" of the 
Regular Army Is Dangerous 
Weakness 182 

XXVIII. What the Present Army Needs . . 190 

XXIX. Citizen Soldiery 197 

XXX. What Is Wrong with the National 

Guard? 206 



THE A-B-C OF 
NATIONAL DEFENSE 



THE A-B-C OF 
NATIONAL DEFENSE 



TRAINED MEN OUR MOST URGENT NEED — 

THE SIMPLE METHOD FOR SUPPLYING 

THEM THROUGH AN ARMY 

RESERVE 



A 



DOMINATING principle of the 
American Commonwealth, though 
unwritten, is that military power shall not 
be maintained for aggressive purposes. 
Therefore all considerations for prepared- 
ness are based on the accepted rule that 
it shall be limited strictly to the strength 
necessary for adequate defense. 

It used to be believed, not only by civil- 
ians but by some military authorities, that 

i 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE ' 

a small army and navy would furnish a 
safe "nucleus" on which a completely ef- 
fective fighting force could be built 
quickly in time of war. This belief made 
the country contented with its "skeleton" 
army. 

There may have been some sound rea- 
soning in this theory once. There is none 
now. Modern war has become a matter 
of such enormously complicated science 
that civilians snatched suddenly from 
peaceful pursuits cannot hope to master 
it in time for emergency. Army move- 
ments and battles call for such extreme 
physical exertions that men accustomed 
to the indoor life of cities cannot possibly 
meet the demands until they have had 
some months of hardening. 

Even so far back as the Franco-Prus- 
sian War there was a striking proof of 
the impossibility of enlarging a skeleton 
army with the flesh and bone of fresh re- 
cruits. General Lapasset, in front of 
Metz, failed again and again to hold posi- 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

tions with his brigade, which was made 
up partly of trained soldiers and partly 
of newly enlisted men hastily recruited. 
In desperation, he eliminated the un- 
trained men, sending them to shelter with- 
in the fortress. Thereafter, his numeri- 
cally weakened but now coherent and 
trained brigade held its ground against 
the same attacks that had sent it reeling 
when it had more men in it. 

Thus the people of the United States 
must realize first of all that training is 
vital. Any project for defense that fails 
to put it foremost, surely will break down 
under test. It may be accepted as an 
axiom that untrained men who go into 
war hereafter will go not to fight but to 
be killed. 

Courage as an active factor in battle 
has become almost useless. It is de- 
manded more than ever to hold men 
steady, but the sheer courage that in the 
days of short-range, slow-fire guns car- 
ried men in a hurrahing charge to cap- 

3 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

ture gun-positions, can do nothing to-day 
against batteries three and four miles dis- 
tant. The bravest men who ever lived 
cannot charge across an area of three 
miles whose every foot is sprayed by 
bursting charges. 

Men are not sent into action to die, but 
to survive. Only training can teach this. 
A trained regiment whose peace strength 
is doubled for war by an influx of raw 
volunteers becomes a maimed organiza- 
tion in the very moment when its highest 
efficiency is demanded. War is the most 
inexorable thing that there is. Its inevi- 
table punishment for weakness is destruc- 
tion. 

To give Americans the necessary train- 
ing, without forming a large standing 
army or entering on a career of militar- 
ism, army experts and political students 
have agreed on a feasible and easily oper- 
ated method. This method is to form an 
army reserve. 

The public has been more or less ham- 

4 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

pered in understanding the simplicity of 
the army reserve scheme, because there 
is so much legislative and administrative 
complexity of detail about it. These de- 
tails, however, really are not anything 
that need to concern the civilian public 
at all. No matter how much the details 
may vary, the object of all the proposed 
legislation is the same. It is simply to 
assure to the United States the services 
in time of war of every available man 
who has been trained by previous service 
in the regular army. 

The method proposed for forming such 
an army reserve is to cut down the term 
of enlistment to the minimum period that 
is needed to make a man a thoroughly 
trained soldier. As soon as this is ac- 
complished a newly enlisted man is to take 
his place, while the trained man gets his 
discharge from active service on condi- 
tion that he shall be at the instant bidding 
of the Commander-in-Chief of the army. 

5 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

It will be necessary, of course, to pay a 
certain small sum annually to the men 
who thus hold themselves in reserve, but 
the expense will be vastly less, both in pay 
and in maintenance, than if the Nation 
attempted to support a big force actively 
in the army. 

An army reserve begun under this sys- 
tem would increase in astonishing arith- 
metical ratio. Assuming the term of en- 
listment to be one year, the reserves at 
the end of five years would be four times 
the standing army. In other words, for 
each soldier enlisted in the fifth year, 
there would be four men in reserve ready 
for immediate service. 

If the power for forming such a reserve 
were in the hands of the War Depart- 
ment, it is safe to say that it would be 
in operation to-day. It is, however, a 
matter that is in the power of Congress 
alone. It rests with the House of Rep- 
resentatives and the Senate whether the 

6 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

United States shall begin at once to build 
up such a reserve, or whether it shall 
blunder on as it is doing now and as it 
has done since the Revolutionary War. 



II 



OUR THRE)£ UNDS OF PROTECTION — SHIPS, 
HARBOR-FORTS AND ARMY 

THE deciding factor in the problem 
of defending the continental terri- 
tory of the United States is that there are 
more than 30,000 miles to defend, all of 
it coast-line. 

No other Nation has a similar defen- 
sive problem. The conditions make it im- 
possible for either a navy alone or an 
army alone to furnish complete protection. 
Therefore the principle which has been 
accepted and never altered is that there 
must be three lines of defense: a fleet, a 
system of harbor defenses and a mobile 
army. 

Unfortunately the harbor defenses and 

8 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the army have come to be regarded as 
one, both by the public and Congress. 
This grave fallacy has led the Nation to 
fall into the mistaken belief that harbor 
defense meant defense of the entire coast. 

Furthermore, the garrisons of the har- 
bor defenses, known as Coast Artillery, 
have been counted as part of the strength 
of the mobile army, which has given a 
most misleading idea as to the actual size 
of that army. The Coast Artillery can- 
not possibly be used to strengthen the 
mobile army in time of war. It is locked 
up in the harbor defenses and cannot be 
moved from them so long as there is a 
hostile ship afloat. 

It is urgent that Americans shall recog- 
nize clearly that the harbor defenses and 
the mobile army have functions that are 
absolutely different. The harbor defenses 
are fixed and can operate only against an 
enemy who seeks them. The mobile army 
is the only American land force that is 
free to act against an invader. 

9 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

In point of adequate preparedness and. 
efficiency, the present values of the three 
lines of defense are: (i) harbor defen- 
ses: (2) fleet; (3) mobile army. 

This is a fatally incorrect proportion. 
The correct relative values, if every line 
of defense is made properly efficient, will 
be (1) fleet; (2) mobile army; (3) har- 
bor defenses. 

This means, of course, not that the effi- 
ciency of the harbor defenses should be 
lessened, but that the fleet must be so 
strengthened that it will serve as the first 
line of defense, while the army should be 
increased because in the event of invasion 
it has to defend the harbor defenses as 
well as the country. 

The harbor defenses lead m efficiency 
to-day largely because they are matters 
of permanent engineering. The Corps of 
Engineers of the United States Army, 
famous for its achievements, built them 
so that they are the admiration of foreign 
experts. Being permanent, they have not 

10 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

suffered like the ever-changing army and 
navy from the whimsical irregularity of 
Congress legislation. They need impor- 
tant improvements which will be named 
elsewhere, but their most direct defect is 
a gross weakness of trained garrisons. If 
the other two lines of defense were in 
such satisfactory condition, or so easily to 
be made perfect, there would be little need 
for anxiety. 

It is regretted by military experts that 
the name "coast defenses" has been ap- 
plied so generally to these works. They 
do not defend the coast. They protect 
only the very limited harbors whose en- 
trances their guns command. Doing this, 
they serve entirely the whole purpose for 
which they are designed. They prevent 
absolutely an attack from the sea on 
American ports. They prevent a hostile 
naval force from establishing any naval 
base in a secure haven. They prevent a 
hostile army from landing in a harbor and 

force it to undertake the hazardous opera- 

ii 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

tion of landing on the open coast- As 
long as the forts hold out, they make the 
harbors a safe refuge for American naval 
and merchant ships. 

Can they hold out? The answer no 
longer is theoretical. It is the answer that 
has been given by the Turkish defenses of 
the Dardanelles to the most powerful bat- 
tleships of the present day in the first sea- 
attack — an attack that probably was the 
most determined effort ever made by 
ships against sea-coast fortifications. 

It has been asked often by laymen why 
the entire coast line should not be de- 
fended by such works, thus putting a stop 
forever to all danger of invasion. To 
military engineers such a question ap- 
pears too absurd to be worth a serious 
reply, but it is a natural question for civil- 
ians to ask. 

The reply is simple. The utmost ef- 
fective range of the 14-inch rifled cannon, 
the largest sea-coast gun, is 18,000 yards, 
or a trifle more than 10 miles. Therefore, 

12 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

to protect the whole coast, fortifications 
would have to be built a little less than 20 
miles apart if there is to be no gap un- 
covered by gun-fire. For the 30,000 miles 
of coast this would mean 1,500 fortifica- 
tions. 

At the valuation placed on Forts Ham- 
ilton and Wadsworth in New York Har- 
bor, such a chain of defenses would cost 
ten billions of dollars to build and arm, 
and would demand the continuous services 
of one-half million men, even at the pres- 
ent inadequate rate of garrisoning exist- 
ing defenses. 

It is impossible, then, to protect the 
American coast with fixed defenses great- 
ly in excess of the existing ones. By far 
the greater part of the coast line must 
depend solely on the remaining two lines 
of defense — the fleet and the mobile army. 



13 



Ill 



THE IMMEASURABLE VALUE OF THE FLEET 
AS THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE 

ATTACK on the United States can 
come only by way of the sea. 
Even an attack over the northern border 
would involve first an overseas operation. 
America's possessions and foreign inter- 
ests can be held or lost only by strength 
or weakness on the sea. 

To establish naval defense, the navy 
absolutely must be powerful enough to 
seek the foe and attack him. Though the 
military axiom that attack is the only safe 
defense is true of the army as well as the 
navy, it is not fatal to an army to fall 
back on the defensive, whereas it is fatal 
to a navy almost always. 

14 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

An army may intrench itself, await at- 
tack, and win. It lies in the path of the 
hostile army and the enemy must over- 
come it before he can proceed. A navy 
that assumes the defensive can do so only 
by hiding in a fortified harbor to be pro- 
tected by coast guns and mine fields. 
That moment it is eliminated from the 
war. The enemy need not destroy it. 
The enemy ships need not even fire a shot 
at it. They can lie beyond the range of 
the coast guns, and need simply to block- 
ade it. 

It is "bottled up" then, and the enemy 
owns the sea. He can do what he will. 
He can move his troop transports and set 
an army on the coast at his leisure, cov- 
ering the landing with fire from light 
cruisers that could not have dared to ap- 
pear on the ocean before. 

A defending fleet that is too weak to 
fight has absolutely no choice to-day ex- 
cept thus to immure itself. Before the 
time of aeroplanes and wireless, it had 

i5 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

another alternative. It could seek tem- 
porary immunity in flight, to seize a later 
opportunity for striking the foe under fa- 
vorable conditions. But it cannot do so 
now. The air will betray it. 

The daring German ships that held the 
seas so long without a friendly harbor 
do not disprove this point. They were 
serving as roving commerce destroyers, 
and had nothing to defend. They were 
isolated ships that could and did supply 
themselves from their captures. A fleet 
could not do this, of course. 

The American people will do well, 
therefore, to realize clearly that a defend- 
ing fleet that is weaker than an assailing 
fleet must intern or be destroyed. There 
is no alternative. In all human nature 
there is a hopefulness that insists on sug- 
gesting that some fortunate element may 
interpose to bring victory to one's own 
side. Such hopefulness applied to modern 
naval warfare is a midsummer night's 
dream. 

16 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

A fleet action hereafter will be fearful 
and quick. When it is ended, the weaker 
fleet will have been blasted from the face 
of the waters. If any of its units escape 
they will not be enough to make a navy 
for a fourth-class power. 

Is the United States Navy strong 
enough to enter such an engagement with 
any other fleet? 

The answer of the Navy Year Book for 
1914, issued by direction of Congress, is 
given in the following tables : 

RELATIVE ORDER OF PRESENT WARSHIP 
TONNAGE 

Great Britain 2,157,850 

Germany 95 I >7 I 3 

United States 765,133 

RELATIVE ORDER WHEN VESSELS NOW 
BUILDING ARE COMPLETED 

Great Britain 2,714,106 

Germany 1,306,577 

17 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

France 899,915 

United States 894,899 

The answer is more striking still if the 
comparison is limited to dreadnaughts. 
This comparatively new type of ship un- 
doubtedly is the deciding factor in mod- 
ern naval war. The submarine probably 
will alter the conditions and strategy of 
naval campaigns, but when fleets actually 
meet it will be the dreadnaught that will 
do the smashing. This monster with its 
batteries of great guns, more numerous 
than once w T ere mounted in fortresses, is 
the destroying angel of the sea. 

Great Britain has 20 dreadnaughts 
afloat and (last autumn) had 16 building. 
Germany has 13 afloat and 7 building. 
France has 4 afloat and 8 building. The 
United States has 8 afloat, 4 building and 
3 authorized. 

This list is limited to such vessels as the 
belligerent nations actually had laid 
down in the normal course of their ship- 

18 



THEA-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

building programs. It is known that they 
have increased their construction im- 
mensely. 

If the constant advice of the General 
Board of the Navy had been accepted by 
Congress, the United States fleet should 
consist now of at least 32 first-class bat- 
tleships and dreadnaughts, all of a type 
fit for the first line. 



19 



IV 

CONGRESS AND SHIPBUILDING LEGISLATION 

ABOARD of naval officers, known as 
the General Board of the Navy, 
organized in obedience to legislation by 
Congress, laid down a naval policy for the 
United States in 1903. Although the per- 
sonnel of this board has changed continu- 
ally, its members have urged on Congress 
practically the same policy year after year. 
Despite this agreement by the country's 
trusted experts, the policy never has been 
followed by the various Congresses. 

In every other Nation that assumes to 
be a sea-power, it is an unchallenged 
principle that a certain definite number 
of certain definite types of vessels shall 
be constructed every year. It is recog- 

20 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

nized that each year a certain number of 
warships must be retired, because they 
have become antiquated, and that, there- 
fore, a single year's interruption of the 
building program will handicap the navy 
doubly, by robbing it of its quota of mod- 
ern ships and forcing it to carry useless 
vessels. 

The record of Congress for twenty-five 
years shows that it never has adhered to 
a consistent building program. 

The 1890 Congress authorized the first 
true battleships ever built by the United 
States. These vessels, Indiana, Massa- 
chusetts and Oregon, were consistent 
types, equal in tonnage, armament and 
speed. It was a sound beginning. 

Battleships were not an experiment. 
Other navies had been building this type 
for years and it was established that it 
was the only type of ship that would keep 
a navy in the first rank. Yet the Con- 
gress of 1 89 1 authorized none, but appro- 
priated money instead for the Minneapo- 

21 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

lis, a "protected" cruiser, whose type had 
been practically replaced in other navies 
by armored vessels. Both type and speed 
were almost out-dated by the time the ship 
was launched. 

In 1892 Congress permitted the con- 
struction of the battleship Iowa. This 
was a good ship, with tonnage, armor and 
speed greater than in those of the 1890 
class, thus taking proper advantage of the 
advance in naval science. But it was only 
one ship, when three of this type should 
have been authorized. 

The Congresses of 1893 and 1894 au- 
thorized no battleships at all. Thus by 
1895 the Nation had 4 first-class battle- 
ships when it should have had, afloat and 
under construction, 15 ships equal to any 
then in commission. 

The record of succeeding Congresses 

was: 1895, two first-class battleships, 

Kearsarge and Kentucky; 1896, three, 

Alabama, Illinois and Wisconsin; 1897, 

none. 

22 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Therefore, in 1898, when the Spanish- 
American War began, instead of having 
18 first-class battleships afloat and 6 un- 
der construction, as would have been the 
case had the various Congresses voted 
three battleships in each year, the United 
States had 5 — Kentucky, Kearsarge, Ala- 
bama, Illinois and Wisconsin — under con- 
struction with no possible chance of fin- 
ishing them for several years to come. 
The only battleships afloat were the origi- 
nal 4 — Massachusetts, Oregon, Indiana 
and Iowa. 

The result was that the War Session 
saw a mad scramble of appropriation to 
make up in headlong, wasteful speed for 
years of wasteful indifference. In the 
previous session Congress had passed a 
naval bill of some 20,000 words which, 
while it neglected to provide for a single 
battleship or cruiser, had gone carefully 
into such important legislation as appoint- 
ing "four watchmen for the Naval Acad- 
emy at two dollars per day each ; one clerk 

23 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, $1,400; a 
colored book, 'Flags of Maritime Na- 
tions/ of which 1,300 copies shall be for 
the Navy Department and Revenue Cut- 
ter Service and 3,700 copies for the Sen- 
ate and House of Representatives. ,, 

Now, with war on the country, the 1898 
Congress hurled an appropriation of 50 
millions forth in one short bill for "na- 
tional defense." There was a rush to buy 
freight and passenger steamships, steam 
yachts and even tugboats. The conse- 
quence was such a naval spectacle as prob- 
ably never was seen in war before. 

American naval officers almost wept, 
and foreign ones laughed. Observers 
have not forgotten, and will not be able 
to forget while they live, the wonderful 
fleet that Admiral Sampson took to bom- 
bard San Juan de Porto Rico. There 
were armored and unarmored ships, each 
of a different type, age, tonnage and 
speed. There were "converted" yachts, 
meaning plain, ordinary pleasure yachts 

24 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

that had guns mounted hastily. To crown 
the absurdity there were coast defense 
monitors, 10 years old, utterly useless for 
battle and so slow that at last the war 
fleet took them in tow. Thus the Ameri- 
can Navy by the Grace of Congress went 
to war. 

It is an open secret that later in the 
war when Admiral Cervera ran out of 
blockaded Santiago, some of his vessels 
nearly escaped despite the fact that he 
had to make his attempt under the worst 
possible conditions for flight or battle. 
He had to emerge from the bottle-neck 
inlet of Santiago, one of the tightest en- 
trances in the world, through which ships 
can pass only one by one. He had to run 
with the rocky coast on one hand, pre- 
cluding any chance for escape by scatter- 
ing or sudden change of course. Yet 
whoever has visited the wrecks of the 
Spanish ships has been astonished at their 
great distance from Santiago. 

The reason was largely that no two of 

25 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the American ships were equal in speed. 
Between the Brooklyn and the Indiana 
there must have been a difference of al- 
most six knots. The speeds of the others 
varied wildly in all degrees between. 
With such great differences the swiftest 
ships could not afford to chase at top 
speed. In an hour's chase they might 
have left their slower mates so far behind 
that they might have given the Spanish 
vessels an opportunity to turn on them. 
That was in 1898. The lesson holds 
good to-day. Without a consistent build- 
ing program, followed undeviatingly by 
every future Congress, the United States 
will continue to have ships varying so 
unduly in speed and fighting power that 
they cannot exert their maximum strength 
in coherent action. And it is fleet action 
that wins naval war, not single ship ac- 
tions. 



26 



V 



WHAT A "SYMMETRICA^" FLEET SHOULD 

BE WHY IT ALONE CAN INSURE 

EFFECTIVE DEFENSE 

UNTIL recent times, it was a practice 
of governments to carry warships 
on their active lists as long as they were 
seaworthy. Naval experts always ob- 
jected that a warship was not a ship but 
a machine, and that seaworthiness was 
only a minor factor in determining its 
value; but the public, especially that of 
America, liked to count its navy by num- 
bers and insisted on assuming that every 
vessel was a good warship while it re- 
mained afloat. 

A few years ago, largely as a result of 
the accentuated shipbuilding rivalry be- 
tween Great Britain and Germany, the 

27 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

naval Powers of the world were compelled 
to recognize that warships reach old age 
in a period when merchant vessels still 
are in their prime. In 1910, as a result 
of carefully tabulated and analyzed ex- 
perience, it became an established funda- 
mental principle of all naval programs 
that a warship, no matter how sound and 
apparently effective it might be outwardly, 
was past its useful life when it reached 
the age of twenty years. 

The establishment of this absolute age- 
limit forced an instant readjustment of 
the values ascribed to ships of all ages 
between, and made necessary a recogni- 
tion of the fact that the American first 
line of battleships was not so large as it 
had appeared in old lists. But another 
and more dominating factor than age as- 
serted itself at about this time in a man- 
ner not to be gainsaid. It was the sudden 
and amazing change that came over naval 
architecture with the established success 
of the dreadnaught type of battleship. 

28 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

In 1906 Great Britain completed her 
first ship of this type, Dreadnought. Un- 
til that time the heaviest armament car- 
ried on battleships was four guns of 10, 
11, 12 or 13-inch diameter in the bore. 
As late as 1908, after the Dreadnought, 
Great Britain launched two ships carry- 
ing only four 12-inch guns in the main 
armament, the United States completed 
one, France one, and Germany launched 
two with four 11 -inch guns each. The 
naval experts still disagreed as to the 
practicability of so hugely increasing 
main armament as the Dreadnought type 
implied. 

By 1909, however, all the great navies 
were definitely embarked on the principle 
of building dreadnaught * fleets, and in- 
stantly all previous ships that had seemed 
monsters before were rendered secondary. 



* American naval usage is "dreadnaught" as 
name of the type. The first British ship of the 
type was named "Dreadnought." 

29 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

As a result, many ships whose age en- 
titled them to be carried in the naval lists 
as highly modern cannot properly be kept 
in the class of first line ships; and it has 
become more essential than ever that a 
scientific building program be undertaken 
at once and adhered to by succeeding Con- 
gresses. 

The armament placed on the dread- 
naught to-day would have been considered 
incredible and preposterous by naval ex- 
perts of fifteen years ago. It has made 
such a vast difference between United 
States ships built within the past five 
years and those built seven and eight years 
ago that it would be wholly impossible to 
form a cohesive or "symmetrical" fleet 
containing both types. A very simple 
statement of the existing differences will 
make this fact clear even to laymen who 
know nothing whatever about ships. 

Let it be assumed that a squadron of 
eight of the newest United States ships 
were to attack a squadron of ten ships that 

30 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

are nearest to them in age, but were built 
before the dreadnaught type was accepted. 
In that case the modern squadron of eight 
dreadnaughts, New York, Texas, Arkan- 
sas, Wyoming, Florida, Utah, Delaware, 
and North Dakota, would muster 20 14- 
inch and 64 12-inch guns against 40 12- 
inch and no 14-inch guns on the ten battle- 
ships Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, Ver- 
mont, Connecticut, Louisiana, New Jersey, 
Georgia, Virginia, and Rhode Island. 

In other words, the eight dreadnaughts 
could throw more than twice as much 
metal from their main armaments as 
could be thrown by the ten battleships. 
In addition, the dreadnaughts have their 
main batteries so disposed that they can 
bring them to bear practically all together, 
while the older vessels cannot use more 
than one-half their guns simultaneously 
under ordinary maneuvering. Thus in 
reality the ratio is more than two to one 
against the older vessels. Yet the four 
ships of the Kansas type are only eight 

31 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

years old, and the six ships of the Con- 
necticut type nine years old. 

In the matter of speed, the incoherence 
produced by only a few years' difference 
in age may be understood with equal ease. 
The dreadnaught type ships are 21 -knot 
vessels. The Kansas and Connecticut type 
has only 18 knots speed. If a fleet be 
made up of both these types, the swift 
dreadnaughts at once lose the advantage 
of their superior speed because, if they 
steamed at their maximum speed, they 
would leave the Kansas type ships seventy- 
two miles behind in twenty-four hours of 
steaming. This would mean, of course, 
that, in the event of attack, the American 
ships would be so far separated that the 
slower ones could not come up till long 
after the fight is ended. 

Hence, it is plain that the incorporation 
of inferior ships into a squadron or fleet 
does not merely weaken the fleet to that 
fractional extent,but actually forces the en- 
tire fleet to assume the weakness of the few. 

32 



VI 

the reai, situation regarding 

America's dreadnaughts 

and battleships 

ON October 17, 1903, the General 
Board of the Navy, having studied 
carefully the conditions governing foreign 
and American naval policies, reported that 
safety demanded an American Navy con- 
taining 48 battleships. At that time there 
were in commission ten battleships, while 
fourteen were either under construction or 
had been authorized, the completion of 
the last of the fourteen being due by 1907. 
In view of the building programs of 
other Nations, it was believed that all pur- 
poses would be answered if the United 
States fleet of 48 battleships were com- 

33 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

pleted by 19 19. Therefore, the Board 
recommended that Congress institute a 
building program of two such ships every 
year. Such a program would have pro- 
duced the desired fleet by 1919, without 
making allowances for replacements. 
It was not an extravagant schedule. The 

1904 Congress, however, authorized only 
one ship. The General Board asked the 

1905 Congress for 3 battleships in order 
to make up the deficiency. Congress re- 
fused and authorized 2 ships. In 1906 
the General Board again asked for 3 and 
got 1. The 1907 Congress authorized 
1. The General Board, now 3 battleships 
short, asked the 1908 Congress for 4 and 
got 2. It asked the Congresses of 1909, 
191 o and 191 1 for 4, and got only 2 each 
time. 

In 1 910 there entered the new element 
of age, experience having proved that 
twenty years was absolutely the age-limit 
for warships. 

It became apparent that in 19 10 battle- 

34 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

ships should be laid down to replace In- 
diana, Oregon and Massachusetts, that 
Iowa should have to be replaced by 191 2, 
and that Kentucky and Kearsarge should 
require substitutes by 191 5. Accordingly 
in 1912 and 191 3 the General Board asked 
for 4 battleships in each year, but each 
Congress authorized only 1, thus increas- 
ing the shortage in the original program 
to 5 and making the entire shortage of 
battleships nine when counting the loss 
to be caused by the retirement of Indiana, 
Oregon, Massachusetts and Iowa. 

In November, 19 14, under the General 
Board's original plan as modified by the 
1910 replacement policy, there should have 
been 38 battleships in commission less 
than 20 years old, 7 building, and 2 auth- 
orized. Instead, there were only 30 in 
commission, only 4 building, and 3 author- 
ized. This is a deficiency of 10 battleships 
from that contemplated in the original pro- 
gram, which, it must be understood, was 
prepared under the direction of Congress, 

35 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

and which has been approved and adhered 
to by all the naval experts who have suc- 
cessively become members of the board 
since the original incumbents laid down 
the policy. 

There have been so many conflicting 
statements about the existing dreadnaught 
fleet, both in criticism and in defense of it, 
that the public evidently has become per- 
plexed- The following are the simple, 
straight facts as to its composition and 
condition : 

The battleship fleet afloat and ready for 
service consists of 14 ships in the "first 
line'' and 19 ships in the "second line." 
The "first line" contains the thoroughly 
modern ships less than 9 years old, which 
are adjudged to be fit for decisive battle 
action. The "second line" contains the 
ships ranging from 9 years to 20 years in 
age. There should be eliminated entirely 
from this list Indiana, built in 1895, Ore- 
gon and Massachusetts, built in 1896, and 
Iowa, built in 1897. Kearsarge, Kentucky 

36 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

and Alabama, built in 1900, while only 15 
years old, are well outclassed also, and 
probably would be retired now had Con- 
gress authorized a program that would 
have provided ships to replace them. In- 
diana, Oregon, Massachusetts and Iowa 
certainly should not be carried on the list. 
It is proper, therefore, to say that the "sec- 
ond line" contains only 15 battleships, and 
it would no doubt be quite just to cut it 
down by three more. 

Of the ships in the "first line," there 
are 4, Kansas, Minnesota, New Hamp- 
shire, and Vermont, that do not approxi- 
mate the other ships of this line in either 
tonnage or speed, and that are entirely out 
of the first line class in armament, carry- 
ing main batteries of only four 12-inch 
guns, against the 10 and 12 gun batteries 
of the others. 

Therefore the only battleships that may 
be held to be actually ships of our "first 
line" are the battleships Michigan and 
South Carolina, armed with main batteries 

37 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

of 8 1 2-inch rifles each; and the 8 dread- 
naught ships : New York and Texas, car- 
rying 10 14-inch guns each; Arkansas and 
Wyoming, with 12 12-inch guns each; 
Delaware, Florida, North Dakota, and 
Utah, carrying 10 12-inch guns each. This 
makes ten battleships in all in the first 
line. 

These are fine ships, none more than 5 
years old. But the situation in the "sec- 
ond line" is different- The ages of these 
vessels are: one 20 years old, two 19, one 
18, three 15, two 14, one 13, one 12, one 
11, six 9, one 8, or, if the four ships of 
the Kansas class be listed as of the "sec- 
ond line/' as they should be, there will be 
five of 8 years old. Thus, there are 12 
of the 19 ships that are past one-half of 
their effective age. All these "second 
line" ships, whatever their age, have main 
armaments limited to four great guns 
only. 



38 



VII 

WHAT BATTLESHIPS CANNOT DO 

THE dreadnaught has appealed so 
much to popular imagination that 
most of the arguments for a larger navy 
have confined themselves to discussion of 
these monsters. But dreadnaughts alone 
do not make a navy. To be capable for 
war, a fleet absolutely must contain several 
different types of ships assembled in cor- 
rect proportion. 

To understand the necessity for this, 
it is sufficient to understand that war on 
sea differs from war on land only in de- 
tails, not in principle. The primary ob- 
jects of either a sea or a land force are: 
(i) to discover the enemy, (2) to know 
his strength, (3) to gain the most advan- 
tageous position, (4) to fight him. 

39 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Everybody knows probably that an 
army, however large it might be, is quite 
powerless to operate without a big force 
of scouts and advance detachments. The 
navy is in exactly the same position, except 
that its task is far more difficult. Land 
forces move through country more or less 
populated where there always are spies 
and other means of intelligence. The sea 
force is on an enormous, vague waste, 
greater in area than a continent. Further- 
more, natural conditions on land confine a 
hostile army to certain known directions 
of movement. A hostile navy can go 
where it will. 

Therefore, a fleet of dreadnaughts or 
battleships alone, no matter how power- 
ful, cannot form a useful fighting organ- 
ization, because battleships are only the 
smiting force — the heavy artillery, so 
to speak. When fleets of battleships 
actually meet and engage, the naval 
war almost certainly will be decided 
then and there; but until they do meet, 

40 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the mastery of the seas remains undeter- 
mined. 

Clearly a defending fleet might as well 
not exist if it cannot find the enemy fleet. 
Even if it were immensely superior to the 
foe, so long as the latter evades it he can 
sweep the ocean or attack coasts. If the 
enemy is superior, the naval campaign be- 
comes a game of blind man's buff reversed, 
the defending fleet trying to escape blind- 
folded and the pursuer following with his 
eyes wide open. 

It is impossible for battleships to obtain 
for themselves the knowledge that they 
must have before they can begin to move. 
One reason is that it would be suicidal for 
a commander to detach battleships for 
scout purposes. The issue of a pitched 
naval battle probably always will depend 
on the massed force of great ships brought 
to bear at one time and place. 

Apart from this, they are inferior in 
speed. Although the giants of to-day have 
extraordinary velocities, lighter ships with 

4i 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the same character of engines naturally 
always will be faster. For this reason, 
with the advent of the hugely armored and 
hugely armed brute righting ship the light 
cruiser has attained great importance 
again — not for any fighting purpose what- 
soever, as once was the dream of naval 
tacticians, but for spying, scouting and 
patrolling. 

Flying machines and the rushing de- 
stroyers also act as scouts for "their bul- 
lies, the ships of the line/' but their radius 
of action is limited by their nature. The 
information that they bring comes from 
distances so short that the two fleets will 
be approaching battle. Their reports are 
invaluable for the execution of the battle 
plans, but for strategy — the preliminary 
movements and devices that may enable 
one side or the other to deliver a crushing 
blow — their range of observation is far 
too small. 

The needed advance information can be 
obtained, at the present time, only by large, 

42 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

very swift vessels that have a cruising 
radius as great as, or greater than, the 
battleship fleet. As an army thrusts a 
screen of cavalry in front of it, so modern 
navies thrust enough scout cruisers ahead 
to investigate every possible sea-area. 

It is the mission of scouts to precede a 
battle-fleet by half a thousand miles and 
even more, and to send their news back 
by wireless. Five hundred miles practi- 
cally is the minimum limit of safety on 
the sea for such advance scouting if the 
battle-fleet is to profit by it in time, where 
an army might be content with advance 
scouting as little as fifty miles from its 
front. The reason is that an army would 
require at least three days to move fifty 
miles, while a battle-fleet, steaming at 14 
knots an hour in fleet formation, would 
cover the 500 miles in 36 hours. 

It is plain that lacking scouts of such 
great sea-going range, a fleet might, and 
probably would, blunder into a trap set by 
a better informed enemy who shall have 

43 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

assembled hastily a superior force of pow- 
erful vessels. 

In the United States Navy no scout 
cruisers have been authorized since the 
1904 Congress authorized the construction 
of Birmingham, Chester and Salem. 
These were highly efficient vessels with 
speeds of 243/3 knots, 26 knots, and 26y 2 
knots, respectively. Though they have 
lost some of their speed, they still are 
serviceable. Carrying as they do only the 
armament of two 5-inch and six 3-inch 
guns each, and not being intended or con- 
structed for fighting, they have not been 
so seriously out-classed by the advance in 
naval construction as the big battling ves- 
sels have been out-classed in all navies by 
the mere passing of a few years. 

But there are only these three in the 
whole American Navy. No single other 
large vessel of equal speed has been au- 
thorized by Congress in the past eleven 
years, though the naval estimates have 
asked for such ships consistently. The 

44 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

report of the General Board of the Navy 
dated November 17, 19 14, repeated the 
request strongly and asked for an imme- 
diate authorization of four such ships, 
adding that the United States Navy is 
"peculiarly lacking in this element so es- 
sential for information in a naval cam- 
paign." There was no result. 



45 



VIII 

the destroyer — almost next in value 
to the dreadnaught 

IN explaining its naval policy, the Gen- 
eral Board of the United States Navy 
has placed the destroyer as the type of 
the warship next in importance to the 
battleship. The story of how this value 
has been attained by the craft that once 
was esteemed only as a minor auxiliary, 
is the story of startling changes in naval 
theory that have occurred within the life- 
terms of Americans of middle age. 

Not many years ago Kipling wrote one 
of his most popular poems in description 
of an imagined battle between the Clamp- 
her down, a huge, slow, armored battle- 
ship, and a light cruiser that "carried the 
dainty Hotchkiss gun and a pair o' heels 

46 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

wherewith to run." According to Kipling, 
the light cruiser pranced around the un- 
wieldy giant, silenced its guns and swept 
its decks. 

The poet expressed the opinion of more 
than one naval expert, and with some 
show of reason. Big guns still were in- 
accurate in themselves, as was proved by 
the famous and inefficient no-ton guns 
that the British Admiralty had adopted 
at about that time, only to withdraw the 
ships that mounted them. In addition, 
gunners were poor marksmen. Range- 
finding and fire-control were largely ex- 
perimental. Under such conditions, with 
the slow rate of fire delivered by big guns 
of that date, speed might very possibly 
have gained a decision over a heavier but 
slower and clumsier ship. 

But even while people were reciting the 
verses and deeming them prophetic, con- 
ditions were changing. Big guns began to 
fire accurately by scientific calculation. 
The day that the first great shells smashed 

47 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

in unbroken series into a bobbing target 
miles away, the hour of the light vessel as 
a fighting factor had struck. 

At that same time the torpedo boat was 
passing, though it survived a little longer 
in the estimation of the public and even of 
naval strategists. This "mist-wraith" that 
flitted on the midnight sea and struck and 
fled, not only appealed to public imagina- 
tion with its fearful possibilities, but kept 
many an Admiral awake nights. Unlike 
the submarine, the torpedo boat never had 
an opportunity in a protracted naval war 
to prove itself to any great extent; but 
its existence affected naval construction 
and tactics immensely, and it inspired the 
conception of what is now one of the most 
effective and valuable types in a modern 
navy — the torpedo boat destroyer. 

At first the torpedo boat destroyer was 
little more than a torpedo craft large 
enough and sufficiently well armed to be 
superior to the torpedo boat proper. Thus, 
the Bainbridge, the first American de- 

48 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

stroyer, was not quite twice as large as 
torpedo boats then in use. It carried two 
3-inch rapid fire guns and five 6-pounders 
against the three or four i -pounders that 
most torpedo boats mounted. Against the 
26 to 30 men carried by the smaller craft, 
it carried 76 men and 3 officers. 

In the beginning the speed of the de- 
stroyers was not consistently greater than 
that of the torpedo boats- For some time 
naval constructors believed that the latter 
craft always could be made faster, and 
even after destroyers were being built 
largely, torpedo craft still were being con- 
structed with engines that could out-speed 
the new type. But gradually the destroyer 
attained velocities that made competition 
hopeless. 

It was this, probably, that relegated the 
torpedo boat to peaceful retirement. It 
was not battle-test but experience driven 
home in maneuvers that demonstrated the 
superiority of the destroyer. When the 
United States ship Gloucester (a converted 

49 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

pleasure yacht) sank the Spanish torpedo 
boats Plat on and Terror during the Span- 
ish-American war in fair fight, it was as 
if the little craft that had been sung 
throughout the world by poets as the exe- 
cutioner of the battleship vanished finally 
from the imagination of naval men. 

For some years it has been so completely 
eliminated that the destroyers have quite 
lost their original prefix of "torpedo boat'' 
destroyers. It is the only thing that they 
lost. Instead of diminishing in importance 
with the disappearance of the prey for 
which they were devised, they gained 
steadily in engine power, size and arma- 
ment and finally became an inherent part 
of the war fleet. 

Armed with three and four twin 1 8-inch 
and 2 1 -inch torpedo tubes, they have re- 
tained their theoretical function of attack- 
ing the under-water bodies of armored 
ships, but this function has remained 
largely theoretical. Enlargement of sec- 
ondary batteries on big ships, improved 

50 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

gunnery, increased speed and vastly im- 
proved search-light systems have reduced 
greatly the destroyer's chances for suc- 
cessful attack with torpedoes, though it 
is assumed that in the clamor and smoke 
of a sea-ba/ttle between the giants the 
destroyer flotillas still may play an impor- 
tant part. 

Their more important and certain work 
that made them valuable was work that 
the destroyers evolved for themselves. 
They are scouts now, able to hold the seas 
in any weather and to steam great dis- 
tances at maximum speed. While they 
cannot vie with scout cruisers in this re- 
spect, they supplement them with a chain 
of intelligence that no other form of craft 
could supply. A secondary but very great 
value is their value as dispatch boats, 
which still are needed despite the wireless. 

For actual fighting purposes, also, they 
are vitally necessary, and would have been 
so had the submarine never been invented. 
This is because they are absolutely the 

5i 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

only craft that can fight against their own 
kind. Against destroyer flotillas the 
dreadnaughts are almost helpless, because 
the little ships, nearly twice as fast as the 
mammoths, can evade them with thorough 
ease. Therefore, the battleships cannot 
fall on the destroyers, but can only defend 
themselves by firing at them with the 
secondary batteries. Important as this 
fact makes a destroyer flotilla for battle- 
ships, the arrival of the submarine has 
made it imperative that the big ships be 
accompanied by them wherever they may 
have to go. 



52 



IX 



THE BATTLESHIP'S ONLY SURE DEFENSE 
AGAINST SUBMARINE ATTACK 

OWING to their own value as war- 
ships, the destroyers would have re- 
mained an inherent part of the modern 
fleet even if battleships never had been 
threatened by renewed danger from tor- 
pedo attack. With the advent of the sub- 
marine, however, they assumed instantly 
a new and enormous value because they 
have had to resume their original func- 
tions against a new and undeniably terri- 
ble reincarnation of their old enemy. 

The war in Europe has proved one 
point to the complete satisfaction of all 
naval experts — that destroyers are not 
only the sole fairly certain defense against 

53 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

submarine attack on a fleet, but that the 
very existence of the armored navy may 
depend on them. 

At present the dreadnaught is fatally 
weak against the undersea torpedo boat, 
which is all that a submarine is. The bat- 
tleship's great batteries of rapid fire guns 
hardly can be considered as defenses, be- 
cause by the time a dreadnaught's crew 
sights the periscope of a submarine and 
fires at it, the dreadnaught's death war- 
rant may already be hurrying toward it 
in the form of a torpedo. 

Armor protection for the hull, increased 
number of compartments and water-tight 
bulkheads, torpedo netting of vastly in- 
creased strength, sound detectors to warn 
of the approach of the submerged killer, 
all are only theoretical at this time. They 
or some new safeguard may be developed; 
but to-day the only dependable defense 
that the dreadnaught has is to keep its 
engines whirling at top speed that the 
submarine shall be unable to approach, 

54 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

or to so change its course when a sub- 
marine is sighted that the latter may be 
unable to send its torpedoes true. 

The modern torpedo has minimized this 
chance of escape seriously. Its vastly in- 
creased propulsive power now makes it 
possible to launch a torpedo from such a 
distance that it is practically impossible 
for the men on the threatened ship to see 
so small an object as a periscope. The 
self -steering devices have made the tor- 
pedo so automatic after it is launched that 
it can be set actually to describe curves of 
known arc so that (theoretically at least) 
a torpedo can be adjusted to dart around 
one ship and strike another beyond it. 

Against these dangers the battleship has 
absolutely no protection within itself. Its 
one and only protection must come from 
means outside of itself, and these are fur- 
nished to-day by only one type of craft — 
the swift destroyer that can circle around 
a battleship, sweeping to and fro at dis- 
tances well at the limit of possible torpedo 

55 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

distances, to sight a submarine before it 
can get its observation and sink to get 
nearer to its prey. 

The destroyer's value for this purpose 
arises from the fact that the submarine 
terror can fire its torpedo by no knowledge 
except such as it has gained by spying its 
prey through its periscope or by rising 
bodily to the surface for a glimpse. 

In that moment the submarine's crew 
fixes the location of the chosen ship, esti- 
mates the distance, and establishes the 
exact direction in which the little vessel 
must approach after submerging. That 
interval of visibility is the destroyer's op- 
portunity. It is then that the destroyer 
tries to sink the submarine by gun-fire, 
ram it, or, failing both these attempts, to 
shoot away its periscopes, which is equiva- 
lent to shooting the eyes out of man's 
head. Lacking its periscopes, the subma- 
rine may dive and escape by running suK 
merged, but it cannot attack. 

It is for this incalculable service, then, 

56 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

that the modern fleet requires destroyers. 
Peace maneuvers carried on during past 
years, and in addition the graphic illustra- 
tions furnished by the European war, have 
assured naval tacticians that destroyers 
are not merely necessary but literally in- 
dispensable. 

Under the stress of this need, they have 
grown into real warships, and so far as 
quality is concerned the United States is 
well in the front with such as it has built. 
Thus, the 6 destroyers authorized by the 
1914 Congress will be 1,100 tons as against 
the 420 tons of the first American de- 
stroyer Bainbridge. The new ones will, 
in fact, be almost one-half the tonnage of 
Atlanta and Boston, the first protected 
cruisers built by the United States that 
served as the basis for the present navy. 
They will carry four 4-inch guns and a 
hundred men. 

But there are very few of them. It has 
been established that for adequate defense 
each battleship needs at the very least four 

57 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

destroyers as its special guard. They never 
must leave it in war. They never must 
be detached from it for other duty. They 
must be large enough to go wherever it 
goes and to hold the seas as long. 

Though the American Navy carries 62 
destroyers on its list, only 25 constructed 
and authorized are highly modern craft 
of more than 1,000 tons, only 26 have a 
tonnage of 700, and the rest are about 400 
tons, which is far too small for oceanic 
work and confines them rigidly to harbor 
and coast service. At the rate of 4 de- 
stroyers to guard each battleship, the 26 
effective armored vessels in our first and 
second line should have 104 sea-going de- 
stroyers ready for battle. As it is, there 
would be enough to protect the 8 dread- 
naughts now in commission. To guard 
the other 18 vessels of the battle-fleet, 
there would be left 19 destroyers. It is 
not extreme to say that this weakness may 
prove fatal in any operation that exposes 
the American ships to submarine attack. 

58 



X 



SUBMARINES — THE NEW AND SUCCESSFUL 
NAVAI, WEAPON 

IT was the explosive gas engine, also 
known as the internal combustion en- 
gine, that made the submarine possible. 
And it has been the lack of a reliable en- 
gine with power enough to give the re- 
quired speed that has retarded, in die 
United States at least, the construction of 
the larger sea-going submarines which 
have proved themselves so formidable in 
the present war. 

This difficulty has been overcome. The 
General Board of the Navy has reported 
that it is "assured that engines have been 
designed and fully tested that will meet 
the requirements, and builders stand 
ready to guarantee the results." 

59 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Therefore the United States has begun 
definitely to build submarines that com- 
pare with the original type as the dread- 
naught compares with the old unarmored 
cruiser. These are known as fleet sub- 
marines, because they are designed to ac- 
company the cruising fleet, while the old, 
small type will be known hereafter as 
coast submarines and will be limited 
to harbor and coast defense and to occa- 
sional activity with the fleet in home 
waters. 

The United States was the pioneer in 
submarine invention and adoption, but it 
fell behind quickly in construction. 
Though the 1893 Congress authorized the 
building of a boat, Plunger, no submarine 
actually went into commission until 1900. 
Three years elapsed before any more were 
placed in commission. By that time Eng- 
land, Italy, France and Russia had en- 
gaged vigorously in under-sea construc- 
tion. By 1904, when Germany adopted 

the submarine and developed it seriously, 

60 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the United States under-water flotilla con- 
sisted of only seven craft. 

However, there now are more than 60 
built or building. An official estimate 
made for the Navy Department July, 19 14, 
tabulated the number built or building for 
foreign navies as : England 84, France j6, 
Germany 31, Japan 17. It is known, of 
course, that since then these powers have 
increased their construction so greatly that 
estimates would be fantastic, and it may 
be that when the veil of secrecy is lifted 
after the war, the United States subma- 
rine flotilla will seem comparatively tiny. 
But submarines can be built in compara- 
tively short periods and their cost is not 
yet unduly high, although already the esti- 
mated expenditure for the sea-going type 
has reached figures beyond half a million 
dollars. 

So far as size and power are concerned, 
the sea-going or fleet submarines author- 
ized by the last two sessions of Congress 
probably will be able to hold their own 

61 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

with any foreign craft, unless the bellig- 
erent nations succeed in producing a "su- 
per-submarine" of which there have been 
rumors. 

The United States fleet submarines of 
the new type are to be 265 feet long, which 
is more than twice as large as the old type. 
Their displacement is to be 1,000 tons, 
which is within 100 tons of the most mod- 
ern destroyers and within 486 tons of the 
United States ship Dolphin, which still is 
in commission. It is calculated that they 
will be able to accompany the fleet under 
either peace or war conditions, as their 
surface speed is to be 20 knots, whereas 
the average speed of a fleet of dread- 
naughts and cruisers is 14 knots in peace 
and 18 knots in war cruising except when 
forced draught is used. 

The cruising radius of these great un- 
der-water boats is to be 6,300 miles on the 
surface, and 3,200 miles submerged when 
their speed under electric power will be 
12 knots. They will be armored and 

62 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

armed with three 4-inch rifles to enable 
them to fight destroyers on the surface. 
They will have six fixed torpedo tubes in 
their hulls, and four on deck in disappear- 
ing carriages. In fact, they will be so 
powerful and efficient that in this very 
efficiency there will be a grave weakness 
that demands intelligent attention by the 
public and by Congress. 

The weakness lies in the fact that this 
new machine has achieved a stage where 
it is superior to the men who must gov- 
ern it. It can endure more than human 
beings can. It carries within itself innum- 
erable and ever-imminent dangers of utter 
disaster, always menacing and not to be 
averted except by incessant, expert watch- 
fulness, knowledge and unfaltering skill. 

Running on the surface, the least inat- 
tention may cause it to founder from tak- 
ing a sea aboard, for its "trim" always is 
within a narrow margin of submersion 
except when all the tanks of water ballast 
are emptied by blowing out, which cannot 

63 



THE A-B-C OF 'NATIONAL DEFENSE 

be done unless the vessel is cruising in 
absolute safety from sudden attack. When 
it is sealed and starts to dive, a tiny error 
in manipulating the horizontal diving rud- 
der may turn it head over end and send 
it plunging to a fatal depth. 

The moment it is submerged, its men 
are cut of! from light and sound — from 
all the things by which human beings 
guide and control their actions. The only 
illumination that they have is the electric 
light that they make themselves. It is 
only by continuous and expert reading of 
gauges and dials that they know in what 
direction they are moving, how deep they 
are, whether their bow is pointing up or 
down, whether they are sinking to a water 
pressure too great for the vessel's strength 
whether their air supply is good, whether 
their water ballast tanks are trimmed cor- 
rectly, whether they are on an even keel. 
The electric motors that propel the ship 
require minute care. Any defect or in- 
jury must be remedied at once, and per- 

64 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

f ectly. The penalty for bungling in a sub- 
marine is death, and a horrible one. 

If the public will realize that all this is 
only the constant routine of the submarine, 
and that there must be added to this in 
war the strain of going into battle, it will 
be easy to realize how vital it is that there 
shall be a highly trained force of men for 
the work. The submarine, more even than 
the intricate dreadnaught, has made it ab- 
solutely impossible to continue with a hap- 
hazard system of forming a naval person- 
nel, or a system that depends on hasty, 
indiscriminate enlistment and emergency 
training when trouble threatens. 

A dreadnaught has 700 men. There al- 
ways is some margin for relief, substitu- 
tion and elimination. The submarine car- 
ries only a sharply limited number, every 
one of whom must be expert. When the 
fleet submarines go to war, not only must 
each one have all these men trained to the 
last degree, but the navy must have within 
it other equally trained men who can re- 

65 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

place instantly submarine crews who are 
disabled. 

The submarine may become the decisive 
weapon of naval war. Without highly 
trained crews it certainly will be wholly 
impotent. 



66 



XI 

IMPERFECTIONS OF THE SUBMARINE 

"XT THAT has been true throughout 
V V all naval wars of the past, and 
what is equally true to-day, is that the 
backbone of any navy that can command 
the sea consists of the strongest sea-going, 
sea-keeping ships of its day, or of its bat- 
tleships." Thus the General Board of the 
Navy said in its report of November 17, 
1914. It repeated not only what the Gen- 
eral Board had declared undeviatingly 
since 1903, but it repeated merely what 
the lessons of all naval wars in all history 
have declared. 

Single ship actions, or fights between 
small groups of ships, may make varying 
fortune of war for months; but the deci- 

6 7 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

sion that means definite victory or defeat 
will come from a fleet action. And the 
fleet that wins will win because its ships 
have superior resisting power and superior 
smashing power. 

"The large increase in submarines is 
most desirable," said the Secretary of the 
Navy in presenting this report to Con- 
gress, "but nothing in the present war has 
disproved the Board's faith in the modern 
dreadnaught." 

It is important that the American peo- 
ple shall not be carried away by the ro- 
mantic thrills caused by exploits of the 
wonderful submarine. Four times in the 
history of our existing navy the scientific 
up-building of the fleet has been halted ser- 
iously by enthusiasm over new types of 
ships that proved fallacies. First came 
the commerce destroyer fallacy, based on 
the belief that a swift, unarmored and 
practically unarmed ship could sweep the 
seas of enemy commerce and escape enemy 
warships by running away. It produced 

68 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the almost wholly worthless ships Minne- 
apolis and Columbia, that soon had to be 
relegated to the position of training and 
receiving ships. Then there was the arm- 
ored naval ram, hailed as the death-blow 
to armored vessels. There were the arm- 
ored, heavily turreted, heavily gunned 
coast defense monitors that cost two mil- 
lion dollars. And finally there was the 
dynamite-throwing cruiser of which type 
fortunately only one ship, Vesuvius, was 
built. It was hailed as a wonder of war, 
and it was an uter failure. 

All these appealed almost as powerfully 
to public imagination in their time as does 
the submarine to-day. The submarine has 
proved itself to be an undoubtedly effective 
and necessary ship, but despite the ex- 
traordinary things it has done in the pres- 
ent war, it has not yet proved that it is 
decisive. It may be that events later on 
may change this condition; but at this 
time, the big ship remains ruler of the 
seas. 

69 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

The one positive achievement of the sub- 
marine is that it has made blockade mor- 
tally hazardous if not impossible. But 
blockade of the American coast would 
mean that an enemy already had won the 
mastery of the sea. If the American 
dreadnaught and armored cruiser fleet is 
properly strong, blockade will be impos- 
sible and the country will not need to fall 
back on the desperate expedient of keeping 
its ports open by submarine defense. In 
this sense the submarine is far more valu- 
able to continental European countries 
whose coasts are on narrow seas, easily 
blocked by close neighbors or raided from 
near-by bases. 

The submarine's second undoubted 
achievement is as a commerce destroyer. 
But here again the narrow seas of Europe 
provide a condition differing from the po- 
sition of the United States. Furthermore, 
in the event of an attack on America, there 
would be no hostile commerce to destroy. 
The only shipping that would attempt to 

70 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

approach our coasts would be friendly 
shipping, to be welcomed eagerly. 

In addition, the United States has been 
consistent for years in working for a free 
sea — that is, for an agreement that in time 
of war all merchant shipping, even though 
belonging to countries at war, shall be 
absolutely immune except when it carries 
actual (not constructive) contraband of 
war, or if it tries to run an actual close 
blockade of a specified port or ports. 
Events appear to be shaping toward a gen- 
eral acceptance of this principle, since the 
destruction of commerce in the present 
war has proved itself to cause irredeem- 
able damage to all sides without over- 
whelming advantage to any. 

There remains then for American con- 
sideration chiefly the actual fighting value 
of the submarine against fighting ships. 
That this is great is undoubted. That it 
is decisive still remains to be proved. 
There is no way to know till a test comes 
whether or not the fleet submarine opera- 

7i 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

ting in the open ocean during a ferocious 
fleet battle, can cause preponderating dam- 
age before the great guns of the armored 
ships already have done their destructive 
work against each other. 

The great inherent defect of the sub- 
marine is that the moment it sinks under 
the surface it is as blind as a blind man. 
There has been no approach yet toward 
curing this serious weakness. Therefore 
the submarine absolutely must expose it- 
self to attack by lifting its periscope above 
water to sight its prey. If the chosen vic- 
tim is stationary, or moving at a steady 
speed in a steady direction, the submarine 
can sink and guide itself with its speed- 
depth- and direction-indicators so that it 
can fire a torpedo at the ship which it no 
longer sees. But if the vessel is immense- 
ly swift and holds an erratic course, the 
difficulty of torpedoing becomes extreme. 

The complete failure of the English 
navy to establish a close blockade of the 
German coast and the complete success of 

72 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

that same navy in guarding perfectly its 
transport of troops across the Channel, 
illustrate graphically both the strength 
and the weakness of the submarine. The 
lesson to be learned from this illustration 
is that the United States Navy must have 
a flotilla of submarines justly proportioned 
to its capital ships, but that nothing should 
interfere with the establishment of a 
proper strength in dreadnaughts and arm- 
ored cruisers. 



73 



XII 

BAT1%£ CRUISERS — TH£ N^W^ST TYPE) OF 
CAPlTAI, SHIP 

WHAT is the battle cruiser? It is a 
hybrid — an attempt to combine 
the speed of a cruiser with the smashing 
power of a battleship. As in all hybrids, 
it has been impossible to give the battle 
cruiser the maximum value of the quali- 
ties of either progenitor. It is not as swift 
as a lighter cruiser with equal engine pow- 
er. It does not carry the armor or the 
array of guns of the dreadnaught. 

The sole question remaining is to de- 
termine if it combines enough of the ex- 
cellent qualities of both cruiser and bat- 
tleship to make it truly a distinct, new and 
valuable type. 

74 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Naval hybrids almost always have been 
failures. In the days of the Armada, the 
Portuguese scored a failure with the mon- 
strous ship known as Carack, which was 
an attempt to combine the qualities of a 
galleon and a warship. In the time of Nel- 
son and later in our own early history, it 
was found necessary to keep corvettes, 
frigates and line-of-battle ships distinct. 

In the history of the modern United 
States Navy a conspicuous fiasco was the 
old Texas, authorized by the 1886 Con- 
gress as a "sea-going double-bottomed 
armored vessel of about 6,000 tons dis- 
placement, designed for a speed of at least 
16 knots an hour." At that time foreign 
navies were building battleships twice as 
large, and the United States was building 
protected cruisers of 19 and 20 knots 
speed. Thus the Texas was an anomaly. 
When completed she was carried on the 
navy list under the mysterious title of 
"second-class battleship." In truth she 
was neither a battleship nor an armored 

75 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

cruiser. Her end was that she was used 
as a target in Chesapeake Bay. 

The battle cruiser appears to have de- 
veloped a certain distinct and noteworthy 
value. The theory in designing the battle 
cruiser was to obtain a high rate of speed 
with a very great cruising radius, and to 
sacrifice for this purpose only enough 
armor and guns to leave the ship still 
qualified for combat with battleships. It 
was calculated that the inferiority in 
smashing power and range would be bal- 
anced by the superior speed, which should 
enable the battle cruiser to out-maneuver 
the battleship. 

Up to the time of writing this article, 
there has been no encounter between bat- 
tle cruisers and battleships. It is only by 
such an encounter, fairly fought out, that 
exact knowledge can be gained as to the 
ability of the new type for holding the sea 
in defiance of strong hostile ships, or as to 
its adequacy in fleet action involving bat- 
tleships. 

7 6 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

The battle cruiser's absolutely dominat- 
ing influence as against all classes of war- 
ships lighter than battleships, has been 
fairly well established by the engagement 
in Helgoland bight, when, during a prelim- 
inary and not decisive battle between Eng- 
lish and German light cruisers a squadron 
of English battle cruisers arrived and an- 
nihilated the German ships almost in- 
stantly. This, however, simply was a 
proof of the invariable superiority of 
heavy armor and heavy ships, and was in 
no sense a test of the battle cruiser as a 
type. 

The most that this engagement may be 
held to suggest is that the day of light 
ships passed away when engine construc- 
tion made possible great speed with hea- 
vier ships. The lesson for the United 
States thus far is that, except for com- 
merce-destroying, the navy of the future 
has no place for unarmored ships save for 
scouting purposes, and that the battle fleet 
should consist of battleships (dread- 

77 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

naughts) and armored cruisers of strength 
that would have entitled them a few years 
ago to be classed as battleships. 

An idea of the strength of a modern 
battle cruiser may be gained from the 
following comparison: 

English battle cruiser Queen Mary, 27,- 
000 tons, 35 knots speed, eight 13^-inch 
guns. 

U- S. first-class battleship (dreadnaught 
type) New York, 27,000 tons, 21 knots 
speed, ten 14-inch guns. 

U. S. first-class battleship (1908 type) 
New Hampshire, 16,000 tons, 18 knots 
speed, four 12-inch, eight 8-inch and 
twelve 7-inch guns. 

An examination of this list will indicate 
that speed is the outstanding quality of 
the battle cruiser as against the battleship 
of dreadnaught type. At present there is 
not a single armored cruiser in the United 
States fleet with a speed greater than 22 
knots. The heaviest armament of any of 
these is four 10-inch and sixteen 6-inch 

78 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

guns. All told there are only n of even 
these inferior vessels and only six of them 
are less than ten years old. Congress has 
provided for none since 1904. 



79 



XIII 

CESSATION OF MISCHIEVOUS MEDDLING BY 

CONGRESS THE FIRST NEED OF THE 

UNITED STATES NAVY 

"OINCE 1900," says George von L. 

O Meyer, former Secretary of the 
Navy, "the United States has spent one 
billion, six hundred and fifty-six million 
dollars on the navy, while Germany had 
spent only one billion, one hundred and 
thirty-seven millions for a more powerful 
one. A fair amount of this difference may 
properly be charged to the heavier costs 
for men and material in the United States, 
but by far the larger part of the difference 
cannot be so explained." 

Where has the money gone? 

It has not been stolen during construc- 

80 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

tion, nor has it been embezzled in the Navy 
Department. Congress and Congress 
committees, ever watchful of Government 
departments and ever ready to investi- 
gate and expose, never have even insinu- 
ated either dishonesty or incompetence in 
performance there. Americans have fallen 
into the habit, with good reason, of point- 
ing proudly to the honesty and fidelity of 
their army and navy. 

The money has not been stolen, but 
wasted. It has been wasted not in paying 
too much for construction, but in con- 
structing too much that should not have 
been constructed and in maintaining too 
many useless or not highly useful vessels. 
There is no dispute among naval men all 
over the world of the statement that for 
the amount that has been spent, the United 
States should have to-day a navy ranking 
second only to Great Britain. 

There is no possible room for dispute, 
either, as to where the fault lies. The 
facts are on record in the records of 

81 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Congress. They can be comprehended in 
an hour's examination of the reports made 
to Congress by Secretaries of the Navy, 
by the General Board of the Navy and by 
other officers. Anybody, even the most 
careless layman, who will read the recom- 
mendations, appeals and warnings in those 
reports and will then read the naval bills 
as passed by the various Congresses, can 
learn from the record of those Congresses 
as set down by themselves, how the ap- 
propriating body has labored to bungle, to 
hinder and to waste. 

Republican and Democratic Congresses 
have accused each other of failing to pro- 
vide this or that number of ships, but the 
true damage to the country has not been 
in this direction. It has been and is in the 
manner of the appropriations. No man, 
however partisan, can point to the records 
and say that any Congress, whatever its 
political complexion, was better or worse 
than any other in this matter. 

In selecting the record of the second ses- 

82 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

sion of the 63rd Congress as an example 
there is, therefore, no intention of criti- 
cizing that body particularly. As a matter 
of fact, it authorized the construction of 
3 dreadnaught type battleships, 6 excellent 
destroyers, 1 fine fleet submarine and 7 
coast submarines — a good record of con- 
struction compared with previous Con- 
gresses. The same evil faults that exist 
in its method of appropriating money for 
the navy, exist in the acts passed by all 
other Congresses. 

The total naval appropriation act of 
June 30, 1 9 14, contains 14,000 words. Of 
these, just 270 words were used for 
appropriating money for the ships men- 
tioned. 

The rest of the long Act was devoted to 
prescribing in detail exactly how the Navy 
Department might spend the other sums 
that are needed annually for its main- 
tenance. Four hundred words were used 
for prescribing puny expenditures, such 
as purchases of ice, stationery, photo- 

83 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

graphs and "religious books." Five hun- 
dred words were expended on the partici- 
pation of the fleet in the Panama-Pacific 
Exposition festivities. Two hundred 
words were devoted to the important mat- 
ter of birth certificates to be produced by 
candidates for enlistment. One hundred 
words prescribed just how clothing outfits 
should be furnished to enlisted men. 

The appropriation for the maintenance 
of naval auxiliaries (a purely administra- 
tive detail of any Navy Department) was 
loaded with a clause enumerating 41 uses 
for which it might be spent, going into 
such utterly trivial and routine details as 
"compasses and compass fittings. " The 
appropriations for the four training sta- 
tions and the war college were burdened 
with the same petty detailed orders. 

In this Act there were such vastly im- 
portant laws as the provision of $360 for 
paying the annual wages of a laborer, 
"four scrubbers at $192 each," "one chief 
laundress at $240." Altogether, this one 

84 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

clause providing in rigid detail for such 
insignificant matters (total amount §22- 
696) had 140 words devoted to it — a little 
more than half the space devoted to appro- 
priating for ships worth $33,410,000. 

It is this sort of legislation to which 
every Congress has given more time and 
attention than to an intelligent building of 
a great navy. It has not only tied the 
Navy Departments of all Administrations 
in a paralyzing web of red tape, causing 
immensely wasteful clerical systems, but 
it has prevented the experts who alone 
know how a navy should be made from 
using any money as their knowledge and 
experience might suggest. It is Congress, 
and not the Navy Department, that "runs" 
the Navy, and after Congress adjourns, 
its dead hand remains heavily on the whole 
naval system in the form of these narrow 
Acts which no naval authority and no 
President may transgress under penalty 
of being punished for violation of the law. 

Ex-President Taft, once a Secretary of 

85 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

War, speaking from experience, said last 
June: "I heartily concur in Mr. Meyer's 
suggestion that Congress allow some dis- 
cretion to the Executive, under the advice 
of a General Staff, in the expenditure of 
money appropriated for the naval estab- 
lishment. One of the real difficulties we 
have had in building up a navy has been 
the little knowledge of naval matters that 
members of Naval Committees in the Sen- 
ate and the House have had, which has 
proved to be a dangerous thing. We have 
available the finest experts in the world. 
Why should we not make use of them? 
The expenditures would be subject to thor- 
ough and prompt investigation. No Presi- 
dent, Secretary of the Navy and General 
Naval Staff could possibly waste the 
amount of money that has been wasted 
under the present system." 

Why has no Congress ever done this? 
The answer is: Politics. 

Why is there no General Staff of the 
Navy, as demanded for years by all naval 

86 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

men — a staff such as every foreign power 
has as a matter of course? Mr. Taft's 
answer, and Mr. von L. Meyer's answer, 
are that "the same Senators and Congress- 
men at whose door can be laid the logroll- 
ing extravagance in naval expenditures 
were bitter in their opposition to a General 
Staff." 



87 



XIV 

THD UNITED STATES NAVY A CREATURE} 
WITHOUT A HI)AD 

PROBABLY the most terrible fleet that 
ever sailed to attack a country was 
the Spanish Armada. It had the vastly 
superior numbers, the crushing power, the 
size and armament that should have made 
victory certain. But it was not organized. 
Its Admirals had only general plans. Its 
captains, excellent sailors though they 
were, had not been trained in fleet and bat- 
tle maneuvers. Its men were brave, but 
they could not shoot. 

The little English navy never could have 
won in stand-up battle. It won because 
its Admirals and Captains worked together 
in a manner that is an object lesson to this 

88 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

day, because all its units acted in accord- 
ance to comprehensive plans, and because 
its men, though they could shoot only 
fairly, shot so much better than the Span- 
ish that there was hardly room for com- 
parison. 

To-day every navy in the world, British, 
German, Austrian, French, Italian, Rus- 
sian, Japanese, Turkish, and even the 
smaller South American navies, are organ- 
ized. Each has a General Staff, or what 
amounts to a General Staff, whose plans 
are ready, who study their own and rival 
fleets every day and change their plans as 
changing conditions arise, and who govern 
the Navy, not spasmodically as ordered by 
meetings of legislatures, but constantly. 

The only navy in the world that has no 
such organization is the navy of the 
United States. 

If war occurred with any degree of 
quickness, the fleet would have to be han- 
dled in a haphazard way under a system 
of control devised in a hurry. Plans for 

89 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

squadron action, for fleet action, for single 
ship movements, for mine laying, for mine 
sweeping, for meeting an enemy or man- 
euvering for delay, all should have to be 
made in the desperate manner in which all 
work has to be done when war threatens 
its swift strokes. 

The Chief of the Bureau of Navigation 
has reported that in time of war at least 
1 60 officers should remain ashore if the 
efficiency of the fleet at sea is not to be 
fatally impaired for lack of trained men 
to attend to its innumerable and instant 
necessities. No provision has been made 
for this force- 

The navy to-day is managed by seven 
bureaus — the Bureaus of Navigation, 
Construction and Repair, Steam Engineer- 
ing, Ordnance, Yards and Docks, Sup- 
plies and Accounts and Medicine and Sur- 
gery. A large part of the time they work 
not only without co-ordination but actu- 
ally at cross-purposes. They cannot help 
it. In fact, the greater the efficiency of 

90 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

each, the greater must be the endeavor of 
each to overbalance the others. 

In one hour Congress could authorize 
the creation of a General Staff to bind all 
these bureaus together. But if such a 
General Staff is created, it will wrest 
power from Congress. A General Staff 
will not fail to object to the construction 
and maintenance of Navy Yards that have 
only 19 feet at low water when the 
draught of battleships is from 26 to 29 
feet. It will not countenance annual and 
ever-varying laws as to the relative ranks 
of commissioned and warrant officers from 
gunner's mates to chaplains. It will assign 
construction to navy yards according to 
the ability of those yards, and not accord- 
ing to the political influence of the con- 
stituencies whose interests demand busi- 
ness for their navy yards. 

That Congress, representing the nation, 
shall always rule and govern the navy is 
proper. It is imperative that the people 
shall dominate their military establish- 
es 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

ment But it is certain that the public of 
the United States desires only to rule its 
navy, and not to manage it. For the pur- 
pose of management it trains officers at 
great expense. On the Naval Academy 
at Annapolis alone the country spends 
more than eight million dollars a year. 
Congress has taken a large part, and a 
most important part, of this management 
out of the trained hands and placed it in 
the hands of committees, many of which 
have been merely political and all of which 
have been ludicrously ignorant almost al- 
ways of naval science. 

Therefore if future Congresses appro- 
priate money for ships without also pro- 
viding for expert management of the navy 
under a General Staff, the money again 
will be largely wasted. Construction with- 
out reorganization is to pile armament on 
a rotten base. Every ship built under 
such political rule is penalized before it 
is launched, by a percentage of inevitable 
and incurable inefficiency. 

92 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Fortunately, this matter, which is abso- 
lutely vital though it is not so spectacular 
as launching dreadnaughts, is something 
that every citizen can grasp without need- 
ing technical knowledge. Congress will 
provide for such common-sense manage- 
ment of the navy by naval experts if the 
public makes its demand felt. 

Rear- Admiral Fiske, testifying in 1914 
before the Congress Committee on Navy 
Affairs, said that the lack of plans and 
control in the navy was such that quite 
without regard to the number of ships or 
supplies of material, the navy could not 
be prepared to meet a highly effective 
enemy in less than five years. 

It is only fair to say that many other 
naval officers consider that his views are 
extreme; but it certainly is safe to say 
that the navy could not be made efficient 
for war within six months. 

Had England required as much as three 
months to prepare her navy, she never 
would have put a man into France, the 

93 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Dardanelles or Africa. Instead, she 
would be fighting now to save her own 
island — and it would be a forlorn hope. 
It was the readiness of her navy that made 
the struggle possible for her. 



94 



XV 

Tll£ AMERICAN NAVY'S ACTUAI, SHORT- 
AGE IN IMPORTANT SHIPS 

IN the preceding articles the writer has 
tried to present the actual and mini- 
mum need of the navy without regard to 
the extremists who wish to build up a 
monster navy because of the European 
War. In summing up herewith the num- 
bers and kinds of important ships that are 
required urgently, the figures are based 
not on the European armaments evolved 
during the struggle, but on the fundamen- 
tal principles laid down in 1903 by the 
General Board of the Navy when there 
was no excitement over war or prepared- 
ness. 

Battleships. — The building program 

95 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

of 1903, modified to meet changed con- 
ditions in 19 10, called for the formation 
of a battleship fleet to number 48 capital 
ships by 19 19, no ship to be more than 
twenty years old. The United States 
Navy to-day is short 10 battleships from 
this program, counting in those that have 
been launched recently and are not yet in 
commission, those that are partially com- 
pleted but still on the ways, those that are 
being begun, and those that have been 
authorized by Congress but have not yet 
been laid down. If Oregon, Indiana, Mas- 
sachusetts and Iowa are dropped from the 
list, as they should be, the shortage will be 
14 battleships. 

It will be impossible now to catch up by 
merely authorizing 2 battleships annually 
between now and 1919. The best record 
of construction ever made was attained 
with the battleships Delaware and North 
Dakota, which were in commission within 
3 years and 2 months after authorization. 
Some of the battleships, however, have 

96 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

required 5 years for completion. The av- 
erage period from authorization to com- 
mission is about 3^ years. 

Had the navy been well organized and 
administered during the past fifteen years, 
it is possible that the nation might have 
its full quota of dreadnaughts now for the 
money that already has been spent. 

Destroyers. — Counting 4 destroyers as 
the absolutely necessary guard for a bat- 
tleship, there are needed 104 sea-going de- 
stroyers for that service alone. There are 
ready, building and authorized, only 57, 
half of about 700 tons and half of 1,000 
tons. This is a shortage of 47. Just how 
many more seagoing destroyers there 
should be to form flotillas for independent 
action, is an open question. Certainly 
there should be enough to form two "di- 
visions" of 12 destroyers each. 

Fi,eet and Coast Submarines. — It 
may be assumed that the present building 
program is satisfactory and that what is 
most required is construction that shall 

97 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

permit the retirement of old and inferior 
types. Possibly it is fairly correct to say 
that there should be immediate further 
authorization of 3 fleet or sea-going sub- 
marines and 10 coast submarines to re- 
place old ones, exclusive of new ones to 
be added. 

Armored Cruisers. — Whatever may be 
the final lesson taught by the battle 
cruiser, a line of armored cruisers of great 
speed is essential for every navy. To pro- 
tect American commerce against com- 
merce-desitroyers ; to drive enemy com- 
merce from the sea; to fight in the second 
line of battle; to act as scouts against a 
fleet that protects itself against lighter 
scouts with swift armored ships of its 
own, the armored cruiser of maximum 
swiftness and maximum fighting power is 
a known potential factor to-day. The 
United States has none quite equal to the 
modern armored cruisers of foreign 
navies. None has been built by the. United 
States in 1 1 years, when the Montana type 

98 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

was commissioned. This ship and the 
North Carolina of the same type and date 
are, however, assumed to be fairly good 
ships of their kind still. 

The construction of ships with at least 
25 knots speed, and possibly 28 knots, 
armed with batteries as heavy as those 
of the present second line American bat- 
tleships, would provide the navy with ves- 
sels equal to most foreign ones of this type, 
and inferior only to foreign battle cruisers. 
The relative number of such cruisers is 
an open question. The British list indi- 
cates that its Admiralty has worked on 
the policy of providing one armored 
cruiser to two battleships. The German 
Navy has only about one to four battle- 
ships, but it is known that the German 
Admiralty had neglected this type for 
dreadnaughts. France carries 20 armored 
cruisers to 30 battleships but has built only 
7 cruisers in the last ten years as against 
23 battleships in the same period. 

Scout Cruisers. — Counting Chester 

99 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

and Birmingham as still efficient, though 
they are n years old, there should be at 
least 4 new scouts authorized with speed 
sufficient to defy armored ships which now 
are being constructed in foreign navies of 
30 and 32 knots speed. 

In addition, the navy needs are for a 
fleet of oil-fuel ships. The only oil-luel 
ship in the navy to-day has 10 knots speed 
and cannot accompany the fleet. There 
are seven colliers, fitted to deliver some oil. 
Between them they cannot supply enough 
oil within 3,000 tons per month of sea 
service. The only submarine or destroyer 
tenders are improvised ships. The only 
hospital ships are Solace and Relief, both 
improvised during the Spanish-American 
War and both of small use, Relief being 
unseaworthy. 



100 



XVI 

WHAT TH# UNITED STATES HARBOR DE- 
FENSES ARE 

DURING President Harrison's term 
(less than 10 years before the Span- 
ish-American War), the writer was in 
Fort Hamilton, one of the defenses pro- 
tecting the entrance into New York's up- 
per bay, when news arrived that the 
United States had sent an ultimatum to 
Chile demanding satisfaction for an at- 
tack on American blue-jackets by a mob. 
At the time there was on the sea an armor- 
clad just built in England for Chile. 

"If that ship wants to steam into New 
York harbor," said one of the artillery 
officers in the fort, "she won't need to pay 
any attention to us, though we fire every 

IOI 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

gun here and every gun in Fort Wads- 
worth across the way. She needs simply 
to keep her men under cover. Our round 
shot couldn't harm her." 

Both these Narrows defenses, then the 
only ones that existed for the great har- 
bor, were armed on that day with cast- 
iron, muzzle-loading smooth-bores, most 
of which had been mounted during the 
Civil War. 

There were guns building then in the 
government gun works at Watervliet, New 
York, that were destined to change this. 
To-day Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth 
may be ranked justly among the big har- 
bor defenses of the world, though the coast 
defenses of Great Britain and Germany 
probably are vastly more powerful. The 
two "forts" have been supplemented as 
defenses for the southern entrance to New 
York by Fort Hancock, situated almost 
twenty miles south of the city on Sandy 
Hook and guarding the entrance to the 
lower harbor. 

102 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Equally powerful defenses protect the 
eastern entrance to the city, the entrance 
to Long Island Sound, Narragansett Bay, 
San Francisco and Puget Sound. De- 
fenses with heavy but lesser armament 
protect enough other harbors to bring the 
number of efficient defenses to about 22. 
A great gap exists in the fact that the en- 
trance to Chesapeake Harbor is unpro- 
tected. Despite continual representations 
to Congress, nothing was done to correct 
this until a recent session authorized the 
acquisition of land on Cape Henry. 

This, however, may be said to be the 
only gross defect in the American harbor 
defense system that will require years and 
much money to cure. The other defects 
may be remedied by the adoption of a 
sensible schedule of management and 
maintenance. 

The creation of this system had its in- 
ception in 1886, when the Endicott Board 
laid before Congress a plan for harbor de- 
fenses worked out by the most eminent en- 

103 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

gineer officers of the army. So correct 
were their ideas that hardly any changes 
in principle have had to be made, although 
they prepared their plans when guns still 
had sharply limited range and when there 
hardly was such a thing as fire control or 
elaborate searchlight installation either on 
ships or land. 

The only real change in principle has 
been to eliminate from the plans a certain 
number of floating defenses, the board 
having recommended either armor-clad 
floating gun-batteries or heavy vessels of 
the coast monitor type. The provision for 
these was due partly to the fact that the 
United States had no navy then, and little 
prospect of any; but a more direct reason 
was that no guns then proved could shoot 
far enough to protect all channels from 
the land. 

A great American achievement cor- 
rected this defect very suddenly. It was 
the production in the government works 
by army ordnance experts of an all-steel 

104 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

rifled cannon, 12 inches in diameter at the 
muzzle, that could fire a conical, hardened 
steel projectile weighing 1,000 pounds to 
a distance almost undreamed of before 
that time. The writer was present when 
the first gun of this type, under test at the 
Sandy Hook Proving Grounds, threw its 
projectile five miles into the Atlantic 
Ocean. Later, under improved powder 
and firing conditions, these weapons have 
developed ranges of 13,000 yards, which 
is 6 J / 2 nautical miles or a trifle more than 
7 land (statute) miles. 

At once the need for floating batteries 
disappeared. There was no channel that 
could not be protected by the fire of these 
truly American weapons. There was no 
ship then afloat that could dare venture 
within their range. There was no naval 
gun that could outrange them. 

Another American invention that came 
almost at the same time caused the only 
other great departure from the Endicott 
Board plans. They had provided for huge 

105 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

steel turrets to protect the guns, because 
the only mountings known for coast guns 
were fixed carriages. The new invention 
produced a gun carriage that could swing 
the enormous 12-inch gun up to the firing 
position as if it were a feather, and with- 
draw it again in the very instant that the 
projectile cleared the muzzle. Immedi- 
ately the highly expensive steel turrets be- 
came unnecessary. It became quite suffi- 
cient to mount the big guns in a sunken 
emplacement open to the sky and protected 
simply in front with mountain-like masses 
of earth, fortified with steel and concrete. 

This merely structural change has given 
the American defenses their visible char- 
acter. Instead of works dotted with steel 
shields like the backs of mammoth turtles, 
the United States harbor defenses are 
tranquil, beautifully sloped hills and ter- 
races with not a hint of armament. 

Oddly enough, the only radical change 

in American defense construction that is 

suggested to-day is the suggestion that 

106 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

turreted protection be reconsidered. There 
still is small fear that fire from the sea, 
even with modern accuracy, could "get" a 
great coast gun in the brief instant of its 
elevation above the parapet ; but increased 
accuracy, increased power and number of 
ships' guns indicate that their fire may 
search the tops of the gun emplacements 
much more closely than had been consid- 
ered possible heretofore. A fleet of 8 mod- 
ern dreadnaughts could throw 118 large- 
caliber projectiles against a single target 
in one minute. While none of these shells 
might strike the gun or even fall into the 
hidden emplacements, it is urged that 
fragments of bursting shell and smashed 
concrete will endanger the gunners and 
disable the numerous installations needed 
for operating great guns. 



107 



XVII 

WHY TH£ AMERICAN HARBOR WORKS CAN 
B£ TAKEN FROM THE} BACK 

IN the wide and sometimes vehement dis- 
cussion of National unpreparedness, 
much stress has been laid on the fact that 
American harbor defenses can be taken 
from the back, meaning from the land 
side. The public should not be misled into 
imagining that the works are wide open 
in the back, and that anybody can walk in. 
They are constructed to withstand a quite 
formidable assault by such landing parties 
as warships might put ashore when operat- 
ing exclusively as a fleet not accompanied 
by troop transports. 

It is, however, quite true that the de- 
fenses can be taken from the back by a 

108 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

military force of any considerable size 
provided with fairly heavy guns. That 
this is so is not a defect of the works. It 
is a weakness of the mobile army, whose 
function it is to resist such an attack and 
to prevent even the possibility of it. The 
harbor defenses were built to fight ships, 
not men. They are not fortifications. 
Huge though they may seem, they are 
nothing but huge gun-mounts. 

There are no fortifications, properly 
speaking, in the United States, nor are any 
contemplated in any scheme of defense. 
A fortification is a great, complete circle 
of protective works arranged either to sur- 
round an important city or to hold a 
strategic point that an enemy cannot dare 
to pass until the fortification has been re- 
duced, or, if he has a sufficiently large 
army, until he has invested it. The theory 
is that if he invests it, he must leave there 
a far larger number of men than the de- 
fending army needs to leave inside of the 
fortress. Thus, while the garrison holds 

109 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

out, the invading force must carry on its 
other operations with a heavily diminish- 
ed army. The immediate result of forc- 
ing an enemy to invest a fortress is to 
weaken him as effectively in everything 
except morale as if he had been well 
mauled in a severe action. 

Of course there are many other func- 
tions of fortifications. They serve as 
pivotal bases for mobile armies, as supply 
bases and as protections for lines of com- 
munication or retreat, but these are aside 
from the question. The point is that the 
American harbor defenses function as for- 
tifications only in the sense that ships can- 
not pass them to seize the harbor and 
cities behind. If a combined naval and 
land force can set troops ashore on the 
coast outside of the fire-zone of the de- 
fenses, the latter form no factor that the 
invader needs to take into account. He 
needs not invest them, unless he wishes to 
open the harbor to his ships. He can 
march past them, leaving them intact, and 

no 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

they can create no danger because they 
have no army within them that might sally 
from their protection to cut his lines of 
supply or assail his forces. 

Should he wish to invest them, he need 
spare only a very small force, because the 
garrison of the defenses is small even 
when at its maximum. If he can do these 
things, it will be not because the harbor 
defenses are weak, but because the mobile 
army is weak. 

If the American harbor works prevent 
ships from forcing their way into the har- 
bor, they serve their full purpose. So far 
as this second line of defense is concerned, 
the nation's sole problem is to make them 
fully adequate for the work. 

As regards construction, they may be 
said to be efficient. The matter of steel 
turrets for the guns still is an open ques- 
tion that will not concern the public till 
experts have agreed on it. No other vital 
structural changes have been urged. It 
is proper to say that American army en- 

iii 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

gineers believe that the works are ex- 
cellent. 

In armament little has developed during 
the present war to shake the American 
army's faith in the powerful 12-inch steel 
mortars which form a prominent part of 
the gun installation of all the first-class 
defenses. They throw a 700-pound coni- 
cal pointed steel projectile with "high- 
angle" fire, making a plunging bombard- 
ment that ships always have most dreaded 
and that they dread still, for even the most 
mightily armored dreadnaught is weaker 
on its deck than along its sides. 

The effect of 700 pounds falling with 
vast velocity from a height of a mile or 
more (caused by its curving flight) may 
be easily imagined, especially when it is 
remembered that the shell carries a giant 
bursting charge as well. 

Ships have not yet attained any arma- 
ment that will enable them to use "high- 
angle" fire. They cannot carry mortars. 
As there are sixteen of these weapons in 

112 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

a battery, and all can be discharged simul- 
taneously, they bear within them poten- 
tialities of utter destruction for the ship 
that falls within their range. 

Not highly esteemed at first for accu- 
racy, mortar fire has attained so high a 
degree of reliability that it is assumed that 
a good gun-company with good fire-con- 
trol and range-finding should score four 
hits out of five shots at 5 miles. The ex- 
treme range of these guns is more than 
twice that distance. 

The largest gun for direct fire mounted 
at present in American defenses is the 12- 
inch. It still is highly efficient, though 
there is no doubt that it is outranged by 
the modern 15-inch guns carried on the 
latest type of dreadnaughts. It must be 
remembered, however, that naval guns 
cannot vie in either range or smashing 
power with coast guns inch for inch of 
caliber. The naval gun cannot attain 
maximum elevation, because of structural 
conditions in the ship. It cannot throw a 

113 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

projectile equal in weight to the projec- 
tiles that can be thrown by land guns of 
the same caliber. 

The 1 2-inch gun, it is established, can 
be so mounted on an improved carriage 
that it can attain a maximum range of 
21,000 yards, which is the range of the 
15-inch naval gun. The projectile, how- 
ever, would have to be reduced to 700 
pounds, thus entailing a diminution of de- 
structive power. 

The 14-inch gun now being successfully 
built in government works will give equal 
range with a heavier projectile and will 
have the added and most important advan- 
tage that the powder pressure in the cham- 
ber is much less, which will give it a far 
longer life than the 12-inch gun possesses. 
It costs little more to build. If expense 
were not an obstacle, possibly it would be 
well that 14-inch guns should be mounted 
not only in all the new defenses, as they 
will be, but should replace all 12-inch guns 

in other defenses. 

114 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

But there is a very decided considera- 
tion — and that is that all the armament in 
the world is useless without effective 
means of operating it. It is in effective 
means for handling even the present arma- 
ment that the American harbor defenses 
are weakest. 



US 



XVIII 

HARBOR DEFENSES IN ACTION 

MODERN great guns are not fired 
by sighting along the barrel. That 
method went out soon after the Civil War. 

To understand how impossible it would 
be to sight a coast gun that way, the reader 
must conceive himself to be standing on 
the parapet of a harbor defense work 
that is about to go into action against 
ships. 

He looks out over a vast, blank semi- 
circle of water without a single mark on 
it to serve as guide for direction or dis- 
tance. Away off on the line of the hori- 
zon are the masts and parts of the hulls of 
ships. 

Let him fix his eye on one. It is a 

116 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

dreadnaught 575 feet long and its fore- 
castle deck is sticking 26 feet high above 
water; but if the observer on the para- 
pet holds a lead-pencil in front of his eye, 
the distant vessel will be blotted out com- 
pletely. 

That, then, is the target — a mark less 
in apparent size than a lead-pencil. The 
12-inch gun that is going to fire at it is 
17 inches thick and it is going to throw 
a shell half as large as a man. In addi- 
tion, the distant target is moving inces- 
santly and in as irregular a manner as pos- 
sible, varying course and speed continually 
to disrupt the gunner's aim. 

It is evident that the mere human eye 
can do nothing. How is the gun aimed? 
It is not "aimed" at all, properly speak- 
ing. Its men do not see the ships during 
the whole engagement. They do not even 
see the ocean. They are down in the pit 
of the gun emplacement. 

The men who do the "aiming" are not 
near any of the guns. They are stationed 

117 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

along the coast, at opposite sides of the 
defenses. Their stations, carefully con- 
cealed, are known as "base stations ;" and 
a straight line drawn between them and 
through the defenses gives what is called 
the base line. 

Of what is it the base? It is the base 
of a triangle. Now it will be obvious that 
when the observer at each end of that line 
looks at the distant ship, his line of sight 
will establish another straight line, or a 
leg of that triangle. Therefore, when each 
observer with his ingenious range-finding 
and direction-finding instruments has 
fixed the exact angle of his line, the ship 
will be at the apex of the triangle thus cal- 
culated. 

That, told very crudely, is the principle 
on which the work of range and position- 
finding is founded. The exact angle once 
obtained, the establishment of the exact 
range is a mere matter of mathematics — 
intricate but positive, and very quickly 
done by modern apparatus. 

118 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

All that the gunners and the officers in 
the batteries can see is the sky overhead. 
All that they are trying to hear is the 
buzzer of the telephone instruments that 
will convey to them the orders from the 
fire-control stations. They wait with every 
nerve concentrated on one thing — on 
catching instantly the order that shall tell 
them, "lateral deviation, so-and-so-much, 
so-and-so-much elevation . . . fire!" 

Their gun, adjusted in the pit, is tossed 
up by the mammoth steel arms of the car- 
riage. It is a violent motion, propelling 
the huge thing upward like a pebble in a 
sling. But it stops, dead, in its firing po- 
sition as if it had been stopped by a velvet 
hand. There is a stunning explosion. Be- 
fore their ears have fully heard it, while 
the emplacement still is ringing and shak- 
ing with it, the gun has been snapped back, 
jerked down into the pit and is in the 
loading position. 

The gunners do not know if they have 
hit or not. They may have sunk the dread- 

119 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

naught. They will know nothing about 
it till the telephone tells them. 

Their business down there in their pits 
is to make their glistening, oil-sweating, 
burning hot, complex engine ready again 
instantly. While some wash out the cham- 
ber, others are hoisting the half -ton pro- 
jectile on its chute and preparing to send 
it driving into the breech. Still others are 
ready with the long bars of brown powder. 
An expert is putting the new primer into 
the breech to fire the cannon with elec- 
trical spark. Engineers are examining the 
oil and air pistons of the mammoth mech- 
anism. Every man's brain and every 
man's hand are working to achieve the 
utmost in fractions of minutes. 

They are watching the swung breech 
that looks like the steel door to a safe 
deposit vault and is almost as complex. 
They are standing by the batteries that are 
to fire the gun. They are standing by the 
wires that are placed everywhere to gov- 
ern fire control, explosion, lighting and 

120 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

communication from a dozen different 
places. 

Every one of these innumerable installa- 
tions is threatened constantly with injury. 
The explosion of their gun shakes the 
emplacement like an earthquake and may 
tear the wiring like a storm. There may 
be half-ton projectiles pounding on the 
works or on their very parapets. Frag- 
ments and rubbish may pour on them and 
bury them temporarily. Everything in 
that pit is being subjected to the most fear- 
ful destructive attempts that man ever 
has devised. 

The habit, the nerve-force and the con- 
centrated skill demanded to fire coast guns 
in such conditions, cannot be improvised. 
They must be there, ready from long pre- 
vious training, when the need arises. How 
many men who are thus trained has the 
nation ? 



121 



XIX 

the; soldiers of the; shore: — the: coast 

ARTII,I,$RY 

THAT part of the land army to which 
is entrusted the operation of the 
harbor defenses is known as the Coast 
Artillery. For many years Congress and 
the Nation have counted it as merely a 
part of the regular or mobile army. Un- 
der the stress of necessity the army or- 
ganization itself has been obliged to use 
the Coast Artillery for field army pur- 
poses. An attempt was made even to de- 
plete the already grossly inadequate force 
by using part of it for siege artillery corps. 
It was like trying to increase cash by 
transferring it from one pocket to another. 
The expedients, forced by poverty of men, 

122 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

have diminished and disorganized the 
Coast Artillery without doing the mobile 
army the slightest good. 

The functions of the Coast Artillery are 
radically different from those of the field 
artillery which belongs to the mobile army. 
Where the field artillerists must be horse- 
men, the Coast Artillery must have men 
trained as boatmen, for a most important 
part of harbor defense is mine-planting, 
cable-laying and even coastal scouting. 
They must have experts in explosives, for 
while the field artillery is served largely 
with "fixed" ammunition (projectiles and 
powder ready cased in brass like cart- 
ridges), the great guns are loaded in de- 
tail, the projectile going in first and the 
powder afterward. It is delivered from 
the ammunition galleries in bags which 
must be ripped open that the big bars of 
powder may be packed into the gun-breech 
properly. In addition, the Coast Artillery 
must load its projectiles with the bursting 

charges. 

123 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

All this is highly dangerous work, and 
apart from the danger great precision is 
demanded, for an error in the loading 
means infallibly a failure of the projectile 
to attain the calculated range. 

Where the field artillerists have a fixed 
target, and can fire without further 
shifting of guns after they obtain the 
range, the coast artillerist has a target that 
shifts constantly. He has no natural ob- 
ject that will serve as a guide to range 
and direction. Every shot that he fires 
must depend on a new calculation ; and this 
calculation must take into account the 
movements that the ship will make be- 
tween the moment of fixing its position 
and the moment that the projectile reaches 
it. 

This involves a knowledge of naval tac- 
tics and of the speed and other capacities 
of hostile ships. The scores of complex 
problems that are presented to the range- 
finders and controllers of fire in a coast 
battery are too technical to be susceptible 

124 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

of explanation here. Many thick books 
have been written about them. But one 
simple example may serve to indicate the 
closeness of computation demanded for 
putting a coast battery into effective ac- 
tion. 

When a 12-inch mortar fires, its projec- 
tile ascends first toward the sky, mount- 
ing so high that it disappears from sight. 
Then it curves and descends to plunge on 
its mark. If the range is maximum, the 
projectile will be in the air a full minute. 
In that one minute a ship maneuvering 
at 14 knots an hour will have moved 1,386 
feet; that is, a dreadnaught of the Okla- 
homa type, which is 575 feet long, will be 
more than twice its length from its orig- 
inal position. Thus the coast artillerist 
actually must fire at a spot that the ship 
has not yet reached when he discharges 
his weapon. 

Of course most of this difficult and 
highly scientific work falls on the officers 
and not on the men. But the Coast Artil- 

125 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

lery is short of officers, even under the 
"peace organization/' which in turn is 
far short of the strength that actually 
would be needed in war. At the minimum 
computation made by the Chief of Coast 
Artillery, the shortage in officers was 856 
in 1914. The shortage is greater now, be- 
cause men have been withdrawn from the 
continental defenses to man the Panama, 
Hawaii and Philippines works. 

Among the enlisted force, also, there is 
urgent necessity for highly specialized 
men, such as electrician sergeants, master 
gunners, master electricians, wireless op- 
erators, and men trained expressly for 
cable work, search-light operation and the 
handling of submarine mines. 

So short is the Coast Artillery of men, 
that the army has been unable to form any- 
thing like even a small fairly permanent 
force of this class of specialists. There 
are not men enough, as a matter of fact, 
even to act as mere garrisons for the de- 
fense system. As the Chief of Coast Ar- 

126 



THE A-B-C OR NATIONAL DEFENSE 

tillery said in his last report, "unless pro- 
vision is made in the near future for addi- 
tional Coast Artillery, it will be necessary 
to reduce the garrisons to mere care-taker 
detachments at some of the defenses, in-' 
eluding Portsmouth, Delaware, Charles- 
ton, Savannah, Key West, New Bedford, 
Potomac, Tampa, Columbia, Cape Fear 
and Mobile." 

The garrisons in some of the defenses 
already are little except such "care-taker 
detachments." Thus one company (104 
men) was the force last autumn in Fort 
Rodman, which is supposed to defend Buz- 
zards Bay and the rich manufacturing dis- 
trict of Massachusetts behind it. Even the 
immensely important and immensely ex- 
pensive works defending the eastern en- 
trance to New York City had only six 
companies which under the present main- 
tained strength numbered less than 600 
men. 

The truth is that the inadequacy of men 
in this branch of the army has been for 

127 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

many years a shocking instance of Ameri- 
can carelessness. Not only has the Coast 
Artillery been inadequate to man the con- 
tinental defenses, but the nation actually 
has spent millions of dollars for defenses 
in Panama and the foreign possessions 
without adding a single man to the 
strength for garrisoning the works. 
Therefore the home defenses, long so 
naked of men as to present tempting op- 
portunity, have been further depleted to 
man the foreign possessions — and, natu- 
rally, these in turn have only a minimum 
of the men who should be in them. 

When all the foreign defenses have been 
garrisoned thus inadequately, there will 
be only "one-third of one relief" left for 
the continental defenses. That means that 
even without casualties there will not be 
enough men to relieve those who become 
worn out under the intense strain of a 
modern bombardment. It means that if 
a hostile fleet is determined, and is willing 
to expend the ammunition and guns and 

128 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

risk a few ships, it can wear out the gar- 
rison in 48 hours merely by incessant suc- 
cessive attacks, even if its fire does not 
injure a single gun. 



129 



XX 

HOW A HARBOR DEFENSE IS ATTACKED 

SHIPS that attack a harbor defense do 
not approach in stately order. They 
do not stop when they fire. Their endeavor 
is to swing at speed toward the works in 
a great circle whose point nearest the de- 
fenses shall bring them just within firing 
range. Before the projectiles have ended 
their flight, the ship will have rushed out 
of range and will be circling out to sea 
to sweep around again for another dis- 
charge. 

That brief moment when the attacking 
ship is within range is the only moment 
in which the coast guns can "get" her. 
They will not, however, be fired unless a 
particularly favorable opportunity pre- 

130 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

sents itself. They may withhold their fire 
indefinitely and permit the ships to pound 
the works, in the hope that they will ven- 
ture in to closer range. 

In such a contest, the harbor defense 
has the advantage. True, the harbor de- 
fenses present apparently a big target 
which is fixed, and the ship is a tiny target 
which is moving swiftly. But the differ- 
ence in size is only apparent. Though 
there may be a mile and more of the de- 
fense works, the only vital parts of them 
are the hidden guns or gun emplacements 
and even if these were visible, they would 
present only a microscopical mark. The 
rest of the works might be battered for 
days without suffering any fatal injury. 

As compared with this, the ship, though 
a small mark, is vulnerable in every part. 
A single well-placed direct-fire projectile 
may injure it seriously, if not mortally. A 
single blow from a mortar projectile, fall- 
ing from the sky, almost certainly will 
wreck it. 

131 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Therefore while a fleet that is battering 
defense works may score a hundred hits 
to a single one from the coast guns, the 
single projectile that strikes a ship may 
do more damage than a hundred or even 
two hundred missiles that strike on 
shore. 

Where the greatest dreadnaught yet 
launched can measure the thickness of its 
armor belt only in inches, the harbor de- 
fense can measure its armor of steel, con- 
crete and earth in yards. 

An attacking fleet, however, will employ 
tactics that are more dangerous than bom- 
bardment. It will strike not at the guns 
alone, but at the eyes that guide and con- 
trol the fire of the guns. It will strike at 
the range-finding and base stations and 
at the search-light installations, to disrupt 
the fire-control system. 

As explained in a previous chapter, the 
range-finding stations are out-lying posts. 
Comprehensive search-light systems also 
demand a certain number of search-lights 

132 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

situated outside of the defenses, some- 
times miles away from the guns. 

An attacking fleet will inevitably send 
light draught gun-boats or destroyer flotil- 
las along the shore to wreck these stations. 
It is an accepted part of sea-attack on 
armed coast forts. Taking a chance on 
escaping the fire from the heavy, compara- 
tively slow coast guns, the swift little 
ships will dash in to dismantle the stations 
with a torrent of fire from light quick- 
firing guns, or they will endeavor to cover 
the landing of raiders that shall assault 
the stations and destroy them. 

If they succeed in doing it, a harbor de- 
fense will be maimed almost as much as 
a submarine is maimed when its periscopes 
are shot away, or as a field battery is 
maimed if its observers and range-finders 
are killed. Lacking fire-control, the big 
guns are engines without direction. Their 
chances for a successful shot are reduced 
to a minimum. 

The danger of these sharp, dashing 

i33 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

raids is especially imminent at night. As 
soon as darkness falls, the harbor works 
must be on their guard in all directions. 
There is only one possible method to 
make such a guard effective. It is to 
have a search-light system installed by 
the most capable engineering and artillery 
experts, and so complete that there shall 
not be a gap of darkness in all the area 
that possibly can be attacked. A gap is 
an open gate; and it will be impossible to 
conceal that open gate from any alert 
enemy. 

Long before the flotillas come in for the 
real attack, the enemy fleet will have been 
making feint attacks by striking quick 
blows at every part of the line of defense. 
Big ships and little ships will engage in 
this work, which is known technically as 
"attacks to develop weaknesses." Let 
them discover such a weakness, and they 
will make a determined, elaborately 
planned and desperately conducted assault 
on it in the first favoring night. 

134 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

The importance of success will be vast. 
Therefore such an attack will not only 
be made with all possible force, but the 
attempt will be masked by simultaneous 
attacks from the whole fleet against all 
other parts of the works. There will be 
furious large-gun fire from the armored 
ships, to engage every possible man in the 
batteries. There will be bold raids on the 
mine-fields to force the focusing of at- 
tention of the force in the mine emplace- 
ments. Small vessels will dash into search- 
light zones, perhaps to perish, but certainly 
to compel expenditure of men and ammu- 
nition that are needed elsewhere. 

One need not have military knowledge 
to picture what such a night will be like in 
an American harbor defense that is under- 
manned, whose search-light system is not 
complete, whose fire-control is not perfect 
and whose mine-fields are not adequately 
protected by search-lights, rapid-fire guns 
and gunners. The great guns forced to 
fire at in-rushing dreadnaughts that do 

135 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL 'DEFENSE 

not intend seriously to attack but inevita- 
bly will force the entrance if they are not 
driven off ; the smaller guns firing up and 
down the beach at half a dozen attacking 
flotillas; the mine-fields invaded by reck- 
less mine-sweepers and counter-mining 
boats ; base, range-finding and search-light 
stations telephoning and telegraphing for 
men to guard them — and not enough men, 
not enough search-lights, not enough am- 
munition ! 



136 



XXI 

WHAT THE HARBOR DEFENSE SYSTEM 
TRACKS AND NEEDS 

Chesapeake Bay Defenses. — Nine 
years ago a joint board of navy and 
army officers appointed as the National 
Coast Defense Board, reported unani- 
mously to Congress that the entrance 
to Chesapeake Bay demanded strong pro- 
tection. "The importance of securing the 
entrance at Cape Henry," said the board, 
"as an outer line of defense to Baltimore, 
Washington, Newport News, Norfolk and 
the great railroads crossing the Susque- 
hanna River at the head of the bay, cannot 
be exaggerated. It was recognized in the 
report of the Endicott Board (1886). Any 
expenditure, however great, is justifiable 
for such vast interests." 

i37 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

The National Coast Defense Board con- 
sisted of George W. Goethals, then Major 
on the General Staff; General Crozier, 
Chief of Ordnance, an expert recognized 
throughout the world; General Mills, 
Chief of Artillery, equally capable; Gen- 
eral Greely, of the Signal Corps; Generals 
Story and Mackenzie, and Captain Sperry, 
of the Navy. 

No nation could desire more competent 
advice from more competent men, but the 
Chesapeake Bay defenses are not built 
yet, or even begun. It was only recently 
that Congress authorized the first step to- 
ward it. 

Coast ArTii^ry. — The authorized 
strength of this branch of the Regular 
Army never has been the strength that 
was needed to man fully the defenses of 
the continental United States. It always 
has been a Congress provision that the 
Coast Artillery Corps of the Organized 
Militia was to furnish the manning details 

138 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

for 50 per cent of the gun and mortar de- 
fenses on the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific 
Coasts. 

This theory as to the militia has re- 
mained a theory. Last June the militia of 
the coast States was short 11,000 of the 
number that would be required. Even if 
the organizations were raised to war 
strength, there would remain a deficiency 
of 5,000 men. 

Some of this militia coast artillery is 
excellently well trained, considering its 
limited practice. Some is useless. Per- 
haps there is no sharper range of quality 
than exists in this branch of the citizen 
soldiery. Of the 450 officers, some 290 
hold War Department certificates of pro- 
ficiency in one or more courses, and al- 
most 1,400 men have qualified as master 
electricians, engineers, master gunners, 
gun commanders, gun pointers, plotters, 
observers and first-class and second-class 
gunners. 

But the efficiency of the organizations 

i39 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

is in unsatisfactory relation to that of in- 
dividuals. Militia Coast Artillery com- 
panies as they exist to-day in very many 
of the States are not qualified to take their 
place in the defenses or serve guns till they 
have been re-organized and drilled. 

The aggregate enlisted strength of regu- 
lars needed to garrison the harbor defenses 
is reported by the Chief of Artillery as 
24,000. The actual number available was 
14,633 in November, 1914. The enlisted 
strength of regulars required to man the 
defenses in foreign possessions then com- 
pleted or about to be completed, was 6,000 
and the actual number there was 2,500. 

"There are now provided about one- 
fourth of the officers and one-half the en- 
listed men necessary to provide for our 
primary home defenses," said the Chief of 
Coast Artillery near the end of 1914. 

Twexv^-Inch Steei, Rif%£d Guns. — 
The maximum range of these with the 

present carriage, firing a 1,000-pound pro- 

140 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

jectile, is 13,000 yards, or 7 1-3 land miles. 
A comparatively inexpensive modification 
of the carriage will permit an elevation 
which, with a 700-pound projectile, will 
give the gun a maximum range of 21,000 
yards. Despite the insistent allegations 
of enormous ranges attained by naval guns 
in Europe during the present war, ord- 
nance experts agree that this range will 
be quite equal to any likely to be achieved 
by a dreadnaught. It will, in fact, be equal 
to that of the new 14-inch guns that are 
building, whose maximum range with light 
projectiles is stated as being about the 
same, while with their standard 1,660- 
pound shell the 14-inch guns can achieve 
only 18,000 yards, or slightly more than 
10 miles. 

Ammunition. — The amount of ammu- 
nition available in the harbor defenses or 
provided for by appropriations up to No- 
vember, 19 14, was for the rifled guns, 

y^ per cent, of the allowance fixed by the 

141 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

National Defense Board, for mortars,. 50 
per cent, of the requirements. 

FirE-ConTroi, Systems. — Seven har- 
bor defense commands have received a 
thoroughly good, standard fire-control sys- 
tem. The fire-control installation of the 
continental defenses, viewed as a whole, is 
40 per cent, incomplete. 

Search-Lights. — The Chief of Coast 
Artillery reported last autumn that the 
search-light project for all the defenses 
was only one-half completed. "The defi- 
ciencies in the matter of fire control and 
search-lights, " said the Chief of Staff in 
his last report which was sent to Congress 
by the Secretary of War, "are of the most 
serious character. As a matter of fact, 
proper fire control and search-light instal- 
lation is maintained in only a limited num- 
ber of first-class defense areas, the re- 
mainder of the fire-control systems and 
search-light equipment being deficient or 

improvised/' 

142 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

To sum up, the harbor defenses as at 
present constructed, established or under 
course of construction, are partially ade- 
quate in rifled guns, practically adequate 
in steel rifled mortars, and 83 per cent, 
efficient in material for submarine mining. 

They are grossly weak in men. Their 
next vital defect, and one which cannot be 
cured in haste when war threatens, is the 
insufficient fire-control and search-light 
equipment. Third in order of importance 
is the deficiency in ammunition. This last 
deficiency is serious, but it can be reme- 
died more quickly than the other defects, 
which will require not merely money, but 
much time and work. 



143 



XXII 

the mobile army — what it is 

THE title "mobile army" defines an 
army that can be moved freely, as 
distinct from forces such as the Coast Ar- 
tillery, which is a fixed or "territorialized" 
army. But "moving" an army means far 
more than merely setting it in motion. It 
is not enough that the men are mobile. If 
it simply were a matter of moving, the 
mobile army in the United States to-day 
could be moved by the organization of any 
great American passenger railroad with 
less trouble than often is encountered in 
moving a metropolitan holiday rush. 

The daily movement of commuters in 
and out of cities like New York involves 
the handling of far more men than the 30,- 

144 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

ooo men of which the mobile army force 
within the borders of the whole United 
States consists to-day. 

A mobile army must be capable of being 
moved as an army. It must be in such 
condition and organization that it can be 
delivered at a given place in a given time 
with all its component parts — its infantry, 
its cavalry, its artillery, its signal, engineer 
and sanitary corps, with all their weapons, 
ammunition, horses, mules, wagons, am- 
bulances, clothing, bedding, tentage, sup- 
ply trains, telegraph and telephone outfits, 
railroad-building, bridge-building and 
other engineering outfits, mining material, 
observation balloons and gas containers, 
aeroplanes and gasolene, surgical instru- 
ments, medicines, field kitchens, forage, 
even lanterns. 

A huge part of this material must be 
actually with the moving army, ready to 
be sent ahead of it to facilitate its opera- 
tions, or with it to serve the army on the 
firing line. The rest must be within reach, 

i45 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

not "going to arrive/' but actually on the 
lines of supply. 

The army moving in time of war must 
absolutely move as an entity independent 
of everything and everybody else. What- 
ever is needed is needed at once. There is 
no time to hunt for it in the country that 
is being traversed. The army needs prac- 
tically everything that citizens need every 
hour and every minute in daily life, and 
it needs, in addition, innumerable things 
that war demands. If these are miss- 
ing, the penalty that war exacts is dis- 
aster. 

There is a great deal of free and easy 
talk about an army "living on the coun- 
try.^ What it really means is that every 
army usually tries, as a matter of policy, 
to subsist as much as possible on the food 
supply of occupied territory in order to 
conserve its own supplies; but no com- 
mander would dare to depend on the coun- 
try around him unless he were forced to 
do so by desperate circumstances as if 

146 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

when he retreats headlong, leaving his 
food behind to save his men, or if the op- 
portunity for an immense success tempts 
a General to take such an equally desperate 
chance with his pursuing troops. 

As a matter of fact, an army that tried 
to-day to live on even a friendly country 
would be facing starvation within a week, 
if not within forty-eight hours. The proof 
of this is furnished every winter when 
railroads happen to be blocked by snow. 
Within twelve hours the cities suffer a 
milk famine. Within twenty-four hours 
meat and other fresh foods become scarce. 
Whenever a disaster overwhelms any dis- 
trict and cuts off the railroad lines of sup- 
ply, the cry of famine sounds from the 
stricken places almost before the details of 
the occurrence become known. 

Scarce as it is, food is the only needful 
thing that a moving army could expect to 
get at all. Almost all other army neces- 
sities are so highly specialized that such 
equivalents as could be furnished by the 

147 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

country would not serve. Even such ma- 
terial as would serve cannot be furnished 
in the needed quantities. Military equip- 
ment could not be obtained under any cir- 
cumstances. 

Therefore even the American army 
moving through its own country must have 
with it all that it needs immediately, if it 
is going into action. All the supplies that 
may and will be rushed to it within a few 
days will not serve the demands of battle, 
which are that every man on the firing line 
shall have instantly what he wants. If 
the army is short 10,000 rations or cart- 
ridges or bandages in the hour of the fight, 
it will not be of any avail to know that 
one million rations, cartridges or bandages 
will arrive the next week. 

The equipment must be there. The in- 
fantry must have the field artillery with it, 
big enough and supplied well enough to 
protect it and save it from being pounded 
helplessly to bits by the enemy. The cav- 
alry must be there, the scouts must be 

148 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

there, the aeroplanes must help the scouts 
and the artillery. 

It is such work that the great Generals 
in the present war, Joffre, French, Hin- 
denburg and Mackensen, have been doing 
— not as a part of their strategy, but as a 
mere incidental business of their more im- 
portant work. They did not learn it on 
paper. They learned it by trying it in time 
of peace, by finding out what could be 
done and what could not be done. 

They, and what is more important, their 
subordinates, learned it in the great peace 
maneuvers that the European nations have 
held as a matter of course. There never 
has been in the United States anything 
even approximating these enormous tests, 
which is all that the maneuvers are. 
Where American officers have handled 
regiments, the European officers have seen, 
every few years, not mere brigades or 
divisions but all the army corps of their 
countries set into motion under stern su- 
pervision that admitted no excuse for the 

149 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

breaking-down of commissariat, ammuni- 
tion supply or engineering material or for 
the failure to deliver complete army or- 
ganizations ready to fight in the destined 
place at not only a designated hour but 
sometimes actually within a period set by 
hours and minutes. 

In these tests every military theory is 
put to the proof, everything that has been 
learned academically is practiced and al- 
most every contingency that war possibly 
could provide is discovered and must be 
met. Consequently, the officers of Europe 
know, from doing it, scores of things that 
our own officers know perfectly well from 
intelligent study, but never have had op- 
portunity to see or try. Ludicrously small 
as the mobile army of the United States 
is, the whole army never has been to- 
gether in one time and place in all its his- 
tory. 

Even in the Spanish-American War the 
strength of the army that finally was as- 
sembled to go to Cuba was only about 16,- 

150 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

ooo men. The second expedition to the 
Philippines was 4,800 men. The concen- 
trations on the Mexican border brought 
together a "maneuver division" of 13,000 
men in 191 1 and a "division" of 11,000 
men in 1913. 

Why has the army never been assembled 
for a test of its officers and men? The 
answer is : "Army Posts !" 



151 



XXIII 

ARMY POSTS AND WHY TH^Y STAND IM- 
MOVABLY in The: way of improv- 
ing thi; ARMY 

EVERYBODY in the United States 
would laugh if a Congressman 
should propose that the naval students in 
Annapolis be ordered by law to confine 
their practice to row-boats; that naval 
lieutenants be limited to commanding tug- 
boats; that Captains be placed in charge 
of 'little gun-boats only; and that Commo- 
dores and Admirals be limited to single- 
ship commands, all on the understanding 
that on the outbreak of war these men 
shall at once take command of dread- 
naught fleets. 

If, in addition, the Congressman should 

152 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

add that until war occurs none of these 
officers shall have the opportunity of see- 
ing a dreadnaught fleet assembled, no 
doubt the country would demand that the 
Representative be interned in a lunatic 
asylum as soon as possible. 

Yet exactly this is what the country and 
Congress is expecting of its West Point 
men. 

When the West Point cadet is gradu- 
ated he must go to an army post if he is 
to be assigned to the command of any men 
at all, for there are no regular soldiers sta- 
tioned regularly anywhere except in army 
posts. Since there are 49 such posts, with 
only 30,000 men to garrison them, it can 
be computed easily that the posts cannot 
possibly average more than 600 men each. 
Transfers and other exigencies may at 
times leave certain posts with less than 
100 men in them. 

Therefore after he leaves West Point 
the young officer enters active service un- 
der conditions that actually assemble a 

i53 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

lesser number of men for drill or maneu- 
vers than he saw at West Point, which 
has more than 600 students. Captains and 
Lieutenants command skeleton companies. 
These in turn do not even assemble with 
other companies of their own regiment, 
because the army posts force a wide distri- 
bution. It is actually true that Colonels 
who wanted to see their own regiments 
have had to travel through the United 
States to do it — and sometimes they could 
not see the whole regiment then, for parts 
of it might be scattered from Alaska to 
the Philippines. 

Generals of Brigade in the United 
States Army cannot hope to have a brigade 
assembled anywhere, except by fortunate 
chance. There never has been a genuine 
army division assembled in the United 
States in time of peace. The troops that 
were sent to Cuba were far from being a 
division in numbers, and their formation 
only approximated a division. The skele- 
ton army of peace remained a skeleton 

i54 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

division in war, and some of the parts 
were missing from the skeleton. 

The divisions that have been assembled 
on the Texas border during the past few 
years of disorder were not divisions nu- 
merically, and despite all the intentions 
and efforts of the commanders to give 
them a genuine divisional organization, it 
was necessary to draw on the Coast Artil- 
lery for some of the component parts. 

The establishment of a military line on 
the Mexican frontier was a welcome op- 
portunity to the army, not because it prom- 
ised a fight, but because it offered the 
chance at last of assembling a respectably 
large body of men and giving many offi- 
cers their first commands under real army 
conditions. It may be assumed, therefore, 
that the War Department and the army 
did its best to collect as many men as pos- 
sible, and to form as nearly perfect an or- 
ganization as possible. 

Yet despite all their efforts, the division 
that was ordered out in 191 1, and that was 

i55 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

to have numbered 19,000 troops, mustered 
only 11,000 twenty-five days after the 
orders for concentration were issued. 
Thirty days later still, it had grown to 
12,600. It reached its maximum strength 
only after 85 days had elapsed. That 
maximum strength was 12,800. Six 
months later it was disbanded, never hav- 
ing come within 6,000 men of the strength 
intended for it. 

Part of this shocking condition was due 
to the insignificant size of the army avail- 
able within our own borders. But a 
greater part of it was due to the army post 
system. Not a single part of that "divi- 
sion" was in the same place as any other 
part. Infantry companies, cavalry troops, 
signal corps, hospital detachments, en- 
gineers, field artillery batteries, all 
had to be collected here, there and every- 
where. 

Nobody of intelligence would expect all 
the parts of a machine to fit if they never 
had been assembled. It is exactly so with 

156 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the army. These scattered troops may be 
likened to beautifully made, perfectly pol- 
ished pieces of mechanism kept in splendid 
order by workers in forty-nine widely 
separated parts of the United States, who- 
cannot possibly know how their particular 
part will fit into the whole. 

There never has been dispute of the fact 
that the officers have done their best with 
the fragments under their charge. For- 
eign military men who smile at the Ameri- 
can "army" testify at the same time to 
their high respect for the ability of the 
American army officer. It was not boast- 
ing when Lindley M. Garrison, Secretary 
of War, at the end of last November's re- 
port which was filled with blunt statements 
of our gross weakness, said that "our small 
army is unquestionably in as excellent con- 
dition as any similar number of men in 
any other military establishment in the 
world. Were it not for a desire to avoid 
invidious comparisons, I should say that 
man for man it is better than any similar 

157 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

existing establishment in the world. I do 
not believe that any one will dispute the 
statement that the army never has been in 
better condition than it is to-day, from the 
most recently enlisted man up to the high- 
est officers. " 

If the need should come to-morrow, 
these officers would be able, without doubt, 
to entrain these excellent enlisted men at 
the various posts in record time. They 
would deliver themselves, without doubt, 
at the point of mobilization in perfect con- 
dition, with all their equipment so far as 
it is available in the posts. But what will 
happen when each of these perfect, iso- 
lated units arrives? 

Each individual fragment, so well 
trained to take care of itself as a unit, must 
immediately become part of a mass which 
it never has met. Add to this picture the 
arrival of militia organizations arriving 
from different States, each of which has 
had its own ideas as to organization and 
supply — or none at all. Surely the scene 

158 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

can be visualized by any citizen, even if 
he never touched a gun in his life. 

It will be like dumping in one huge, 
mixed-up, swiftly growing mass all the 
parts of a mammoth and immensely com- 
plicated engine to be asesmbled in deadly 
haste by men who never in their lives have 
tried to asesmble such an engine and who 
never have even seen such an engine com- 
pletely assembled and working. 



159 



XXIV 

CAN THE AMERICAN ARMY BE MADE READY 

FOR WAR UNDER THE ARMY POST 

SYSTEM ? 

THE army post system has been up- 
held in Congress despite all pro- 
tests, though the arguments in favor of it 
do not allege that the posts are of the least 
military advantage from a strategic point 
of view, or that they are of the slightest 
benefit to the training or organization of 
the American army. 

There are two chief arguments in sup- 
port of the system. One is that the posts 
represent an enormous investment which 
would be a total loss to the nation if the 
posts were abandoned. The other is that 
their abandonment would mean heavy 

1 60 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

loss, if not financial ruin, to many com- 
munities that have been built around them 
or that base a large part of their existence 
on them. 

The latter argument has been assailed 
bitterly as merely an argument in favor of 
political graft. It should be considered, 
however, that the communities which de- 
mand the retention of the posts are a part 
of this nation and that they are entitled to 
appeal to their fellow citizens for protec- 
tion of their interests. They are without 
doubt good Americans like the rest of the 
population, and it would be unjust and un- 
generous to believe that they deliberately 
wish to sacrifice any vital interest of their 
country to their own personal advantage. 

In so far as their Representatives speak 
for their views legitimately and openly on 
the floor of Congress they do only their 
duty. But unfortunately the matter has 
become part of the political give-and-take 
of Congress. Army officers, the War De- 
partment and even Presidents have 

161 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

learned to be chary of attacking the army 
post system, because Congress appears to 
have made the retention of the posts one of 
its jealously guarded prerogatives. It is 
quite true to say that many high army offi- 
cers fear to say anything for publication 
against the army posts, because they fear 
that the politicians will get after them 
for it. 

What are these army posts ? The loca- 
tion of some dates back to British rule, 
when they were established to defend the 
frontier against French and Indian raids 
from Canada. Most of them go back to 
the Indian wars in the west. Some estab- 
lished later were established almost openly 
as a matter of politics. 

Their absolutely useless geographical 
location is illustrated by merely naming 
their sites, such as Arizona, Idaho, Wyo- 
ming, Texas, Utah, Kansas, South Da- 
kota, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Min- 
nesota. If they had been placed delib- 
erately to be as far away as possible from 

162 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

any spot where the army might be needed 
to defend the country against invasion, 
they could not well have been placed better. 

There is not a military argument in 
their favor. In 191 1 the Secretary of 
War told Congress that "nearly all these 
posts have been located for reasons which 
now are totally obsolete or which were 
from the beginning purely local. They 
have universally been constructed upon 
a plan which involves a maximum initial 
cost of construction and a maximum cost 
of maintenance both in money and men." 

The remark about their cost is justified. 
Fort D. A. Russell in Wyoming cost near- 
ly 5 millions to complete. This amount 
would have built a sound harbor defense 
for one of the United States ports. It 
would have paid for a good part of the 
cost of building defenses for the naval 
base of Guantanamo, Cuba, which at this 
time is absolutely undefended and lies wide 
open to attack from even a third-class 
fleet. 

163 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

The annual cost of these posts in main- 
tenance alone is a heavy item, all of which 
is wasted so far as any military advantage 
is concerned, with the exception of provid- 
ing excellently for the health and comfort 
of the troops. They are little cities, pro- 
vided with their own water supplies, 
sewer, lighting, heating, telephone and 
telegraph systems. They have beautifully 
graded streets and lovely green terraces 
and lawns. Some of them look like 
parks. 

Every year the appropriations for the 
posts grow in amount. Congressmen com- 
pete with each other in their care for the 
posts within the terirtory of their con- 
stituents. Thus annually the investment 
of the nation becomes greater. 

The War Department suggests that the 
great increase in the land-values since the 
foundation of the posts might go far to- 
ward balancing the loss accruing from 
their abandonment and might even pay 
a part of the cost of re-locating the army 

164 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

in the better geographical sites that are 
demanded for efficiency. There have been 
no statistics or estimates collected to pre- 
sent the case clearly enough for judgment. 
It can only be suggested that even if the 
abandonment represents a large loss, the, 
United States long ago accepted the indus- 
trial principle that it pays far better to 
"scrap" an inefficient machine or plant 
than to muddle along with it, when a bet- 
ter method is indicated clearly and is dem- 
onstrated as being ready for use. 

Such a method is ready. It has been 
ready for some years. It has been within 
the knowledge of Congress for years. It 
has been presented to the House of Repre- 
sentatives and the Senate not once but 
many times. It is neither of doubtful 
value, nor complex, nor expensive. In 
fact the War Department has proved to 
Congress that the proposed method would 
produce an annual saving in the cost of 
army maintenance of $5,500,000. 

This proposed method of replacing the 

165 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

wasteful and useless army posts, and the 
results to be gained from it, are so simple 
that every American citizen can under- 
stand them. 



166 



XXV 

WHAT ARMY EXPERTS WANT IN PI<ACE OF 
THE ARMY POST SYSTEM 

INSTEAD of small, uncombined troops 
scattered in 49 widely separated posts, 
the military authorities of the United 
States want to bring the soldiers together 
in six or, at the most, eight large groups 
in such stations that they can assemble 
easily for joint training and in emergency 
be sent to a point of concentration in the 
quickest possible time and with the least 
expenditure of money. 

As a basis for such a re-location of the 
army, the authorities name the following 
three territorial areas as being best for the 
defense of the United States: 

( 1 ) The line between the St. Lawrence 
River and the city of Atlanta, Georgia. 

167 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Troops stationed there would cover the 
Atlantic seaboard and could be thrown to 
a threatened point in the minimum of time. 

(2) The line between Puget Sound and 
Los Angeles, to protect the Pacific sea- 
board. 

(3) The line between the Great Lakes 
and the Rio Grande, which would place 
soldiers not only convenient for border 
service but would have the more general 
advantage that the troops there would be 
ready as reserves for either the western 
or eastern sea-boards. 

Under this territorial department sys- 
tem, there would be two or perhaps three 
groups of troops in department 1 and in 
department 2, while department 3 would 
have at least two groups. 

Each group would be properly assem- 
bled ; that is, each would consist of a brig- 
ade of infantry with its scientifically cor- 
rect proportion of cavalry, artillery, en- 
gineers, signal corps and quartermaster's 
and sanitary troops. 

168 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Under this plan, instead of 49 unco- 
ordinated fragments there would be not 
more than 8 completely assembled large 
arm)/, parts which could be put together 
almost instantly to form the only large 
fighting organization that really is fit to 
offer in battle — the army division. 

This simple and business-like plan would 
do much more than merely to form the 
army into compact, quickly available or- 
ganizations. It would be an economy, 
since it would save approximately $5,500,- 
000 a year in maintenance, as mentioned 
in a previous article. It would make re- 
cruiting far easier and would greatly sim- 
plify and accelerate the education of re- 
cruits and their incorporation in the active 
army. It would improve vastly the train- 
ing of the trained army. 

Among still other important advan- 
tages, it would be a very great step for- 
ward in the improvement of the National 
Guard or organized militia, because the 
army groups would be stationed where the 

169 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

local militia could join them easily in ma- 
neuvers. 

As the army is stationed to-day, the 
organized militia cannot get the benefit 
of seeing much if anything of the regulars, 
or of participating in their work. Militia 
officers, who are desiring more and more 
to get regular army tuition, must travel 
long distances at serious expense and loss 
of time. Joint training of militia and 
regulars is possible only when the govern- 
ment can afford to dispatch regular troops 
to some point convenient for the citizen 
soldiers. So little money is appropriated 
for this that joint maneuvers are few and 
far between, though they have been recog- 
nized by both regulars and militia as be- 
ing of the utmost value. 

The wide value of the plan for con- 
centrated grouping of the army was pre- 
sented most lucidly in 19 12 by the Secre- 
tary of War, when he said plainly and 
positively to Congress that the army posts 
were wasteful and worthless. He reported 

170 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

that if the mobile army is to be efficient, 
its distribution must meet the following 
requirements : 

( i ) It must be favorable for the train- 
ing of infantry, cavalry and field artillery 
combined. 

(2) It must be favorable for the rapid 
concentration of the whole army on the 
southern or northern frontier or on either 
sea-coast. 

(3) It must favor the best use of the 
army as a model for the general military 
training of the National Guard. 

(4) It must favor the use of the regu- 
lar army as a nucleus for the war organ- 
ization of both the National Guard and of 
such volunteers as may have to be raised 
in time of emergency. 

(5) The distribution must favor eco- 
nomical administration to give maximum 
efficiency for the annual expenditure on 
the army. 

(6) The distribution must favor a 
peace organization which will be effective 

171 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

in war, that is an organization that will 
permit a prompt expansion by means of a 
system of reserves. 

Most important, however, and in fact 
vital, is that a proper location of the army 
groups would make possible a formation 
of each group in correct military propor- 
tion of all arms. This subject is one that 
lacks the romantic or sensational interest 
pertaining to such matters as shortage of 
ammunition or guns, but it strikes at the 
heart of army efficiency. 

An army that is not capable of being 
put into action instantly in complete tacti- 
cal formation when needed, is not an army 
though its individuals may be perfect. The 
army that needs time is half defeated al- 
ready. Time is the one thing that a 
capable enemy does not mean to give to 
his opponent. 

Until now the supporters of the army 
post system have succeeded in burying ev- 
ery proposed legislation looking toward 

this sane, practical and really vital reform. 

172 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

The army cannot be organized as an 
army under the army post system. It is 
as impossible as it would be to conduct a 
business establishment with each employee 
in a different street. 



m 



XXVI . 

TH£ ARMY DIVISION — WHY IT, AND IT 
AI^ONI^ IS AN DFF£CTlV£ LIGHT- 
ING FORMATION 

ALL army formations from the com- 
pany to the division have been de- 
vised with one object, which is to combine 
numbers of men in such assemblage that 
their united action shall be as nearly as 
possible equal in quickness, ease and cer- 
tainty to the act of one completely efficient 
man. 

Thus the company, the smallest admini- 
strative unit, should move and strike like 
one single man with the strength of a 
hundred. The battalion should strike 
like four such super-men and thus should 
deliver a blow equal to that of a man four 

i74 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

hundred times as powerful as an ordinary 
human man. 

Concentration of power and the ability 
to wield that concentrated power quickly, 
underlie all the tactical formations of ev- 
ery army. They are the fundamental rea- 
sons that have caused practically all na- 
tions to organize their armies into organi- 
zations within organizations — companies, 
battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, 
and, finally, the field army, which is the 
sum of them all. 

Details such as the numbers of men in 
each formation vary according to the mili- 
tary judgment of various nations. It is 
quite possible that American ideas may be 
altered more or less after the lessons of 
the European war become available. Such 
changes, however, will be matters for 
technical experts to consider, and not for 
the people. 

Whatever they may be, the principle of 
army organization will remain the same. 
The European war, misleading though 

i75 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

most of the statements from the belliger- 
ent nations necessarily are, has estab- 
lished the fact that the fundamental prin- 
ciple of constructing an army has not 
changed. 

This principle of construction is as fol- 
lows: 

Infantry, 4 companies make 1 battal- 
ion, 3 battalions 1 regiment, 3 regiments 

1 brigade. 

Cavalry, 4 troops make 1 squadron, 3 
squadrons 1 regiment, 3 regiments 1 brig- 
ade. 

FieXd ArTii^Ery, 4 guns and 12 cais- 
sons make 1 battery, 3 batteries 1 battalion, 

2 battalions 1 regiment, 2 regiments 1 
brigade. 

Engineers, 4 companies make 1 battal- 
ion, 3 battalions 1 regiment. 

None of these alone makes an army. 
Infantry without cavalry would be with- 
out a guide. Cavalry and infantry with- 

176 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

out artillery would be pounded to bits. 
Artillery without engineers could not cross 
a stream that a barefoot boy might wade. 

Infantry, cavalry, artillery, engineers 
and their auxiliary troops, such as signal 
corps, quartermaster's and sanitary troops, 
etc., by themselves are only the limbs of 
an army. If they are not assembled, they 
compare with a true fighting force as a 
mass of separate arms, legs and eyes 
would compare with a fighting man. 

Again, just as a fighting man would be 
useless if he had three arms and only one 
leg, or all his arms and legs but no eyes 
or no stomach, so the various army forma- 
tions are lacking in efficiency unless they 
are assembled in exactly the right propor- 
tion. 

This comparison is not intended to be 
humorous. An army going into battle has 
before it the same conditions on a gigan- 
tic and terrible scale that confront the 
pugilist who enters the ring. His fists are 
useless if his feet are not quick enough 

177 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

to carry him swiftly in to assault or to 
carry him as swiftly away if his opponent's 
blows fall too heavily. His feet and fists 
combined are useless if his stomach is not 
good enough to give him endurance. If 
his eyes do not tell him what his adver- 
sary is about to do, all his other powers are 
handicapped, perhaps fatally. 

The formation that gives the fighting 
force all its limbs is the division. It alone 
has the scouts that are the eyes, the infan- 
try that is the hard body, the artillery that 
is the terrible fists, and the supply trains 
that provide endurance. 

If the army post system can be dis- 
placed, a divisional organization of the 
regular army can be effected even though 
it suffers from its present inferiority of 
men. It will remain a skeleton army, but 
it will be a skeleton that is articulated. 
While it remains distributed in the army 
posts it is not a skeleton at all. It simply 
is a scattered lot of bones of a skeleton, 
with many bones missing. 

178 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

If an emergency calls to-morrow for a 
sudden assemblage of those parts, the ef- 
forts to do so will involve an amount of 
work and delay that must inevitably make 
the Nation curse governmental red tape 
and bureauatic bungling. Yet it will be 
only the simple unavoidable result of the 
present system. 

The orders for assemblage will have to 
pass from General Staff to department 
commanders, from them to other com- 
manders, and so on till they reach the pos^ 
commanders. All orders for assembling 
supplies must go through the same course. 
When the movement starts at last, each 
little detachment will have to come by a 
route different from every other. The dis- 
tances to be covered by the various units 
will vary from hundreds of miles to thou- 
sands. Their supplies will have to be sent 
from depots situated here, there and every- 
where. 

When they reach the place of concentra- 
tion, the only officers who know anything 

179 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

about them will be their own garrison or 
post officers. The officers who are to com- 
mand the mass will have to be drawn from 
departments, from bureaus, from govern- 
ment assignments in New York, Wash- 
ington, New Orleans, San Francisco, 
Seattle, and perhaps a hundred other 
places. 

If the army posts system is dropped and 
the army groups are stationed in 8 places 
in formation as brigades with all their 
tactical proportion of infantry, cavalry, 
artillery and other arms correct, there will 
be none of this mess. The whole army 
could be set into motion within twenty- 
four hours. Before thirty-eight hours had 
elapsed, the groups would be converging 
on the point of concentration, and, having 
arrived there, they would need no disrup- 
tion or organization. The brigades would 
fall into their places and the division 
would be ready. 

And the orders required to do all this 
would be just one telegraphic message 

180 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

duplicated to the Commanding Generals 
of the Eastern, Central and Western De- 
partments, and reading: "Send your Di- 
vision to " 



181 



XXVII 

why the "peace strength" of the 

regular army is dangerous 

weakness 

THE "peace strength" of the regular 
army, which is referred to so often, 
is a system long accepted under which the 
standing army in peace has only a stated 
percentage of the number of men that ac- 
tually are needed to make it effective for 
war. 

There is no desire on the part of any 
except extremists to change this principle 
by bringing the army up to a war strength 
in time of peace. The peace strength as 
maintained at present is too low, and army 
authorities want a larger standing army; 
but they do not propose that the principle 

182 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

of peace strength shall be altered. Finan- 
cial considerations alone would dictate ad- 
herence to this rule. 

This idea of a "peace strength" that is 
inferior to war strength is not a merely 
American measure. It is the same system 
that is fundamental during time of peace 
with even the most military of European 
nations. In all of them the standing army 
is small compared with the size of the 
armies that are to be raised when needed. 

But the weakness of the American sys- 
tem is that while the United States has the 
same peace strength principle as in Europe, 
it utterly lacks the first approach to a 
system by which it can surely raise the 
army to war strength. The foreign na- 
tions really have that war strength avail- 
able and ready. They carry its members 
on their rolls. America carries its war 
strength wholly in imagination. Europe 
knows where to put its finger on every 
man whom it shall want. America trusts 
to luck, although the Wars of the Revolu- 

183 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

tion, of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil 
War and later the Spanish War have 
taught in unbroken, stern sequence that 
there is no such "luck." 

Europe has the war strength as surely 
as if every man of that strength were un- 
der arms. The thousands and hundreds 
of thousands of men who are already 
trained and always ready are not in uni- 
form, and are earning their livelihood in 
peaceful pursuits when there is no war. 
But they are an army as definitely as if 
they stood always in line. They are an 
army because they are "in reserve." The 
nation does not have to depend on them to 
"feel like" volunteering. When the need 
comes, they must serve. 

For a long time the American nation, 
and particularly its Congress, had the de- 
vout belief that there would be absolutely 
no difficulty about raising its armies to 
war strength. There was a beautiful, in- 
spired vision before everybody's mental 

eyes of millions of brave Americans rush- 

184 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

ing to arms and becoming victorious sol- 
diers instantly through sheer force of pa- 
triotism and courage. 

The belief is being shattered now, al- 
though not so many years ago anybody 
who ventured to oppose it was quite likely 
to find himself assailed as a traducer of 
his country. The European war has 
taught by object lessons that courage with^ 
out training is futile. It is possible now 
to state without previous argument that 
the American army cannot be brought to 
war strength within a safe period of time 
unless there is behind the existing army 
another army of men who, though they 
are in civilian life, have been trained by 
previous service and who are obliged by 
agreement to return to the active army 
when their country needs them. 

This proposed system of army reserve 
is not in any sense compulsory military 
service of the kind that makes Europe a 
great array of mightily armed nations. 
Even in Europe the reserve system is 

185 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

merely connected with compulsory service, 
and is not necessarily a part of it. 

Nothing in any reserve system proposed 
for the United States has in it anything 
that could even simulate the "militarism" 
of Europe. There is no suggestion that 
the reserve system shall include the gen- 
eral citizenship. It will be formed wholly 
by the men who enlist voluntarily with the 
regular army as they do now. 

These men will form the war strength 
that shall stand in continual, ever-ready 
preparedness behind the "skeleton" stand- 
ing army. They must respond when they 
are called. It will not be left to their dis- 
cretion. But the "compulsion" is only the 
compulsion that lies on every man in every 
station of life to keep his agreement. Un- 
der a reserve system the regular army 
will depend wholly on voluntary enlist- 
ment as it does now. When a man en- 
lists, he will understand that he must un- 
dertake the obligation to enter the reserve 

after a stated period with the colors. If 

186 



■THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

he does not wish to do this, he need not 
enlist. 

As a matter of fact, however, the ad- 
vantages that are offered to every en- 
listed man in any sound reserve system are 
such that it will make service in the army 
far more attractive than it is now. Thus 
it will not only make the present peace 
strength a sound thing, but it will encour- 
age recruiting up to the limit of that peace 
strength. 

To understand how unsound the peace 
strength principle is without its necessary 
complement of a trained reserve, it must 
be understood that the peace strength 
formation of the American army does not 
merely make the army as a whole short 
so many thousand men in the gross. The 
peace strength shortage permeates all the 
army formations. There is not a company, 
a battalion, a regiment or a brigade that 
could be put into the field at any time with 
a full quota of men. 

For example may be taken the company, 

187 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

which is the smallest administrative army 
unit. It is the basic formation. All oth- 
ers, even the army corps, are built up 
from it. The principle of its creation is 
to form the most effective body that can 
be successfully commanded by not more 
than three commissioned officers. 

The teaching of military experience is 
that the most favorable numerical ar- 
rangement for the company is 150 men 
commanded by 1 captain and 2 lieutenants 
with the necessary sergeants and cor- 
porals. 

Under peace strength, the infantry com- 
pany in the United States Army contains 
65 men. Therefore, to build it up to its 
war strength 85 men should have to be 
put into it. It will be obvious to every 
reader that if those 85 men are untrained, 
the 65 men will be overwhelmed. They 
will not only be unable to stiffen and sup- 
port the raw recruits with their own skill 
and knowledge, but their own value abso- 
lutely will be destroyed. The company of 

188 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

65 trained men will become a mob of 150 
men who cannot pull together under any 
possible circumstances. 

Therein lies the great danger of peace 
strength to the American army. If that 
peace strength is to be increased to war 
strength by systemless, haphazard volun- 
teering, the confusion and demoralization 
thus entailed on all the basic units of the 
army will be like poison injected into a 
main artery. 



189 



XXVIII 

WHAT THE PRESENT ARMY NEEDS IN OFFI- 
CERS, GUNS AND OTHER AUXILIARIES 

THE newspapers of the country have 
presented so efficiently and fully the 
regular army's deficiency in men, that a 
mere summing up will be sufficient for the 
purposes of these articles, which have 
aimed more at explaining the under-lying 
principles that make improvement neces- 
sary. 

There is a subject that should be 
touched on before summing up. It is the 
deficiency in officers. This has been over- 
looked somewhat in view of the more start- 
ling disclosures of the shocking weakness 
in enlisted personnel. 

One of the striking lessons of the war 

190 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

in Europe is that the loss in officers is 
appalling, and that the casualties in some 
instances have been so disastrous that cer- 
tain anticipated operations of supreme im- 
portance have been not merely hampered 
but prevented because there were not 
enough men left to command the 
troops. 

In 1912, two years before the present 
war, the General Staff of the American 
Army in a most comprehensive report on 
"The Organization of the Land Forces of 
the United States" said : "In modern mili- 
tary operations the loss of officers is fully 
as great as the loss of enlisted men. 
Further, under our system it will become 
necessary to detach officers from the regu- 
lar establishment for staff duty and for 
employment with the citizen soldiery. The 
successful maintenance of large com- 
panies requires the presence of the full 
quota of officers and the whole machine 
breaks down if suitable men are not forth- 
coming. The lack of some provision (for 

191 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

reserve officers) is one of the greatest de- 
fects in our military system." 

And again, in a report on "The Military 
Policy of the United States," it was said : 
"We shall require many thousands of offi- 
cers in addition to those of the regular 
establishment as officers of volunteers and 
reserves in case of war, and steps should 
be taken to provide them in time of peace. 
The great losses in the early periods of all 
our wars caused from sickness, lack of 
sanitary precautions, faulty tactics, etc., 
are chargeable directly to the inexperi- 
enced officers placed in command. It is of 
vital importance to every mother and 
father of a young man as well as to the 
nation, to provide means for remedying 
such a state of affairs before it is too late." 

This is not a matter on which the parties 

differ. The 19 12 report was published 

under Mr. Taft's administration with the 

name of Mr. Stimson signed as Secretary 

of War. The report on the Military Policy 

was sent out in Mr. Wilson's administra- 

192 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

tion under Mr. Garrison as Secretary of 
War. 

The remedy for the deficiency in offi- 
cers is the same as for the deficiency in 
enlisted men. It is to form a reserve. 
The method is different. One proposal is 
to grant commissions in the reserve to mi- 
litia officers who qualify and to graduates 
from military academies who will serve 
for a year with the regular army. Many 
other ways have been proposed. The ser- 
vice that the public can do is to back up the 
principle of forming such a reserve and 
let its experts select the best method. 

Enuste;d Mkn. — The army as it stands 
at present, without considering any of the 
foundational reforms that have been dis- 
cussed in preceding articles, needs imme- 
diately at least 25,000 men. This is Mr. 
Garrison's recommendation to Congress 
for the mobile army. It may be accepted 
safely as the minimum. Mr. Garrison's 
now famous report of November 15, 19 14, 

193 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

stated the needs of the army bluntly and 
plainly, but remained absolutely temper- 
ate and calm. It may be added that this 
demand for 25,000 men was intended only 
to meet the demands of a dangerous and, 
indeed, intolerable condition. It will not 
enlarge the army sufficiently to make it a 
formidable force. It will leave all the 
questions of organization, army posts, mi- 
litia and reserves as pressing matters that 
must have the earnest and prompt atten- 
tion of Congress. 

ArTii^Kry. — Trained observers in 
America knew before war was declared in 
Europe that the next war would be a war 
of artillery on a huge scale. No pres- 
cience was required. The Russo-Japanese 
War had established the fact. But per- 
haps not even the prepared Nations of 
Europe realized or guessed how vastly 
artillery would predominate. The matter 
of rifles has almost dropped out of mind 
in the face of the struggle to push more 

194 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

artillery and still more to the scenes of ac- 
tion. 

"We have nothing like sufficient artil- 
lery and artillery ammunition," declared 
Secretary Garrison's report. 

Even counting all the field guns that 
have been authorized but not yet built, the 
country is 208 guns short of the estimates 
made by its experts as to the minimum 
needs of the regular and volunteer army. 
This estimate was based on a lesser num- 
ber of guns to the thousand infantry than 
the European belligerents are using now. 
Discounting the sensational reports that 
come from the battle fields of "thousands 
of field guns," it still is evident that the 
1,056 guns that the United States will 
have when all have been completed, will 
be a small artillery line as compared with 
that of other modern armies. 

Furthermore, this American field artil- 
lery includes few guns larger than the 3.8 
inch field howitzers. Of the huge field ar- 
tillery the American army has practically 

195 



■ 

I 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

none. Its siege gun equipment is largely 
on paper. 

A£ropi,an£s. — On July 18, 19 14, Con- 
gress authorized the addition to the Sig- 
nal Corps of an aviation section not to 
exceed 60 officers and 260 enlisted men. 
The army has adopted, and has stood by, 
the biplane tractor type of machine. The 
tractor is a puller — that is, its propelling 
power is in front instead of pushing from 
behind. The Signal Corps declares that 
its machines are the best known for mili- 
tary purposes. But they are very few in 
number, as may be seen from the small 
number of men authorized for the avia- 
tion corps. Estimates as to the number of 
flying machines in the belligerent armies 
vary so wildly that they can serve no 
sound purpose here for comparison. The 
deficiency of our army in this new and im- 
peratively needed war appliance may best 
be illustrated by the fact that little Servia 
had 60 aeroplanes when the war began. 

196 



XXIX 

CITIZEN SOLDIERY — THE NATION'S ONI.Y 
SOURCE FOR A BIG WAR ARMY 

THE regular army is the only force 
that is distinctly ruled by the Na- 
tion, as expressed in the National Gov- 
ernment. The only other armed force in 
the country, the organized militia or Na- 
tional Guard, is subject to National or- 
ders only under strict laws ; and National 
control is qualified further by powerful 
considerations of policy. 

A third potential force is that of the 
unorganized volunteers, to be drawn from 
the whole country irrespective of State 
lines and to enter the direct service of the 
Nation as a whole. 

This is the body from which the big- 

197 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

gest army should have to come in time of 
stress. It exists only in the nebulous 
realm of theory. It is certain, of course, 
that American citizens would volunteer 
freely and generously in time of danger; 
but not a single man of this army-to-be 
is enrolled anywhere. No human being 
can guess how many men would offer 
themselves, where, when or how they 
would appear for enlistment or what their 
physical fitness would be. 

The only thing that is certain is that 
they will be utterly untrained. Therefore 
the only citizen body that can be reck- 
oned as available for an emergency is the 
organized militia. 

This is a State soldiery. The ancient 
quarrel between States' Rights and Na- 
tional Power that once was so heated an 
issue, still dominates the conditions under 
which the Federal Government may call 
the militia into active service. 

It is a fundamental matter that cannot 

be altered by legislation. The Constitu- 

198 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

tion of the United States has set rigid 
bounds to National control of the State 
militia, in the clause providing that "Con- 
gress shall have the power for calling out 
the militia'' for only three purposes: (i) 
"to execute the laws of the United States," 
(2) "to suppress insurrection," (3) "and 
repel invasion." 

Thus the organized militia cannot be 
called to operate one inch beyond a Unit- 
ed States frontier. In 1903 Congress 
tried to beat the devil around the bush 
by giving the President authority to call 
out the militia for service "either within 
or without the United States," but in 19 12 
Attorney General Wickersham advised 
the Administration that the law was un- 
constitutional. He suggested that the 
term "to repel invasion" might have elas- 
ticity enough to permit the use of militia 
for crossing an American border if an 
enemy were assembled just beyond with 
clear intent to pass that border, or if in 

repelling invasion it should be advisable to 

199 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

pursue and capture a retreating invader 
beyond the frontier. His phraseology, 
however, intimated that even this was a 
tentative suggestion for stretching the 
meaning of the clause. 

Assuredly the organized militia could 
not be sent into Mexico. It could not be 
sent to Panama or the insular possessions. 
The only way to make the militia available 
for such service is to ask (not order) or- 
ganized militia regiments to volunteer as 
a body for enlistment in the United States 
Army. This is what was done in the 
Spanish War, when militia was wanted 
for Cuba and the Philippines. 

To accomplish it, the Government had 
to accept the militia units with their own 
officers and to appoint those officers tem- 
porarily to corresponding grades in the 
National Army. The result was excellent 
where the officers were good. Where they 
were not good, the results were very bad 
indeed. 

This fact illustrates the weakness of 

200 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the organized militia system in its capac- 
ity as an indispensable factor in American 
defense. The weakness is not that the 
militia wants its own officers to command 
it in war as in peace. That simply is a 
graphic symptom of the weakness. 

The weakness is that the Nation main- 
tains a regular military army in quite in- 
sufficient numbers because it expects to 
fortify it with militia, and yet this indis- 
pensable militia is not amenable to any di- 
rect National control. Even if the militia 
were perfect, it is obvious that in time of 
emergency there must always arise vast 
difficulties in trying to combine one ma- 
chine (the regular army) which has been 
constructed and managed by one govern- 
ment (the Nation), with 49 other ma- 
chines that have been constructed separ- 
ately and managed separately by 49 gov- 
ernments. 

In actuality the difficulty will be in- 
creased overwhelmingly because the mili- 
tia is not nearly perfect. Perhaps the 

201 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

most striking cha: acteristic of the organ- 
ized militia considered as a whole is the 
enormous difference in quality between 
the organizations of the various States 
and even the difference between organi- 
zations within the same State. 

Some States have regiments almost as 
well trained as are regulars. Other States 
have so neglected or mismanaged their 
citizen soldiery that practically the entire 
National Guard of such States is wholly 
unfit. 

The same difference exists among the 
militia officers. There are many who 
have become accomplished soldiers. They 
have spent their time and their money 
generously for no reward except that of 
serving their country, and they have un- 
dertaken work so arduous that most citi- 
zens would shrink from it. It is so, also, 
with the enlisted men. Where unmilitary 
citizens devote their spare time to their 
own pleasure, thousands of National 
Guardsmen cheerfully work year after 

202 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

year in their armories and give up their 
scanty vacation time to field drills or ma- 
neuvers. These men, many of them hum- 
ble citizens, deserve every honor that the 
Nation can pay them. 

The calamitous phase of this situation 
is that these men who have qualified them- 
selves for war, will have to pay in blood 
and life for the weakness of the inefficient 
organizations. When the latter break, it 
is the trained men who must try to save 
the day by a desperate stand. And no 
State, however wise and efficient, can 
force another State to reform its militia. 
The National Government cannot do it. 

That is the crass weakness in the 
American system of depending for war 
service on a mixed body, partly regular 
soldiers bound to unquestioning obedience 
to the Nation and partly citizen soldiers 
bound to obedience only to their States. 
It might be a sound system, if it could be 
administered soundly. 

Many efforts have been made to "get 

203 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

around" the Constitutional provision that 

forbids Federal control. One Congress 

Act has provided for Federal assistance 

to the States with cash and equipment. 

This costs heavily, and much of the money 

and supplies are wasted by careless States, 

but it enables the War Department to 

prescribe conditions of efficiency if a State 

wants to participate. Under this plan the 

regular army authorities have managed to 

institute many valuable reforms. 

The most encouraging development, 

however, is a change in sentiment toward 

regular army aid and instruction. It was 

brought about largely by the system of 

assigning regular army officers to instruct 

State militia on request of the Governors. 

They were received at first with coldness 

and often with active antagonism, but 

they have broken down opposition by 

demonstrating their ability. To-day it 

can be said truthfully that the National 

Guard as a whole welcomes instruction 

from the United States Army, and an 

204 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

annually increasing number of commis- 
sioned and non-commissioned officers has 
to be detailed for the work. 

The proposal most prominently before 
the Nation now is to give the State mili- 
tia a certain amount of Federal pay, in 
return for which the militiamen must 
agree to enter the service of the Nation in 
time of need. This, it will be seen, is an- 
other attempt to get around the Constitu- 
tion, but it does so in a legitimate man- 
ner, since it does not try to stretch the 
Constitution but proposes only a volun- 
tary contract between the Nation and the 
citizen soldiers as citizens. 



205 



XXX 

WHAT IS WRONG WITH TH£ NATIONAL 
GUARD ? 

THOSE who dismiss the National 
Guard with a few contemptuous 
words perform as poor a service to their 
Country as do those who proclaim orator- 
ically that the militia is prepared to fight 
a victorious battle any moment. 

The very fact that there is a National 
Guard proves the faithfulness and patriot- 
ism of plain American citizens. The fact 
that it has improved measurably in quality 
during the past decade indicates that fur- 
ther improvement is possible. Such im- 
provement would be certain if every taint 
of State politics and private politics could 

be removed from the organization, and a 

206 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

legitimate but thorough and fairly manda- 
tory Federal control could be established. 
Such Federal control would give the en- 
tire organized militia of the country one 
uniform system of education, drill and 
equipment. It would organize the militia 
into army divisions, not necessarily lim- 
ited to State lines. 

To-day the National Guard decidedly 
is not fit for war. It may be doubted if 
it could be rendered fit in six months. 

The defects existing at present in the 
organization as summarized here are 
taken largely from the official statements 
of an army officer whose whole attitude 
when he made his reports was friendly 
to the militia. Therefore his criticisms, 
even when strong, may be accepted as be- 
ing forced only by undeniable facts. This 
officer is Brigadier-General A. L. Mills 
of the General Staff of the United 
States Army, whose last report was made 
in his capacity as Chief of Militia Af- 
fairs. 

207 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Numbers. — More than 60 per cent, of 
the infantry and engineer companies, 70 
per cent, of the cavalry troops, 80 per 
cent, of the coast artillery companies, and 
practically all of the field artillery bat- 
teries are below the lowest minimum num- 
ber of men prescribed for such organiza- 
tions. In no State in the Union is the 
prescribed minimum peace strength of all 
organizations maintained. In many in- 
stances the companies are such in name 
only and utterly worthless to the Nation 
as a military asset. 

Divisional Organization. — Only two 
States are so far advanced that their Na- 
tional Guard may be expected to become 
a properly organized army group in the 
near future. All the other States are 
deficient in auxiliary troops for their in- 
fantry, even where their infantry itself is 
grossly inadequate in size. 

Rifi,£ Practice). — Records of eight 

years show that only about two-thirds of 

208 



. THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the militia throughout the country have 
availed themselves of opportunity for rifle 
practice. This is the average. Many 
States fell far below it. The records of 
some of these low States in 1913 were: 
percentage of strength firing rifle, 3.33, 
19.40, 21.97 and 23.50 per cent. 

Stated in numbers, the record is more 
graphic. Out of a total of 111,140 men 
and officers supposed to pursue the pre- 
scribed course of rifle practice, only 
66,974 actually fired on the range, and a 
great part of this number did not pursue 
the course, but had merely more or less 
practice. Only 42,599 qualified as second- 
class marksmen or better. No infantry- 
man can be regarded as fit for battle pur- 
poses unless he is at least a second-class 
marksman. Therefore this record means 
that only 38.3 per cent, of the militia in- 
fantry of the United States were suitable 
last year to take the firing line. 

In this connection it may be suggested 

that the public must not be deceived by the 

209 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

remarkable shooting done by militiamen 
at the various competitions and matches. 
These are picked shots. They are to be 
counted by dozens as against thousands 
who cannot shoot at all. 

Cavalry. — Many militia organizations 
have bought their own mounts and main- 
tain them at their own expense because 
their States will not aid them. The States 
as a rule discourage cavalry because it is 
more expensive than infantry. One State 
owns only 5 horses. Two others own 7 
each. Twenty cavalry organizations have 
neither riding halls nor stables. Seven 
others have riding halls but no sta- 
bles, and six have stables but no riding 
halls. 

Eight States have only 1 troop of cav- 
alry each. There are only five cities that 
have cavalry in excess of 100 men. Fifty- 
five troops occupy one-troop stations, 
which means that they cannot expect to 
have squadron drill — and the squadron is 

210 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the smallest combatant unit. Men who 
have not been trained to ride in squadron 
would, very possibly, cause more disaster 
to their own side in a charge than the ene- 
my might cause. 

Fii&d Artii^ry.— Only one State has 
supplied its infantry with a full quota of 
protective field artillery. Five States 
have each 66 per cent, of the required 
number of batteries (in men). Eight 
States have 50 per cent. each. Fourteen 
States have 42 per cent. each. Five 
States have only 25 per cent, and four 
States have 17 per cent. 

Twenty-eight artillery organizations 
are entirely unprovided with facilities for 
mounted instruction. This means that 
they can practice with their guns in the 
armory, but that they never get a chance 
to learn how to take them into action ex- 
cept perhaps at an annual encampment. 
Twenty- four organizations reported that 
they had held no mounted drills during 



211 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

the entire year. Eighteen drill halls were 
reported as not being adequate even for 
the instruction of the battery dismounted, 
and 34 halls were not provided with facili- 
ties for sub-caliber practice. 

Forty-one artillery bodies out of 67 had 
no artillery target practice during a whole 
year. These facts lend decidedly menac- 
ing point to General Mills , remark that 
"the States which send their infantry into 
active service without having made every 
possible effort to supply it with an ade- 
quate field artillery support, will see in 
the needless sacrifice of that infantry the 
cost of their short-sigh tedness." 

It must be remembered that the Regu- 
lar Army, short in everything, is short in 
nothing so much as in field artillery. 
Therefore the State militia, if it goes into 
battle, can get no help from the regulars, 
but must go in naked, perhaps to be blown 
to fragments by an enemy who drops shell 
on it from a distance so great that he is 

miles beyond their reach. 

212 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

Sanitary Troops. — Only two States 
have a full quota of field hospitals and 
ambulance companies. Seventeen States 
have no ambulance companies at all. 
West of the Mississippi River there were 
only 7 field hospitals and 2 ambulance 
companies in the year ending June, 19 14. 
Many organizations were reported in that 
year as being without proper medical ma- 
terial, and as lacking even their comple- 
ment of service shoes and overcoats. The 
entire organized militia, if called out at 
once, would go to battle lacking 269 am- 
bulances of the minimum number that it 
is certain they would need desperately. 

Coast ArTii^Dry. — This part of the 

National Guard is short 11,000 men of the 

minimum force needed to man one-half 

the gun defenses in the United States. 

The War Department has reported that 

training has been unsatisfactory because 

of small and irregular attendance making 

it "impossible to organize and train per- 

213 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

manent gun and fire-control sections/' 
while "adequate armory instruction and 
team work is almost out of the question." 
It is only just to say that the efficient or- 
ganizations in this branch of the service 
have made records as excellent as the in- 
efficient ones are poor. Thus, of the 450 
coast artillery militia officers, 290 hold 
War Department certificates of profi- 
ciency in one or more coast artillery 
courses, while almost 1,400 enlisted men 
qualified for various duties of high class. 
But the organizations, as organizations, 
are not qualified to take their places in 
American harbor defenses and serve their 
guns immediately against an enemy. 
They would need organization and drill. 
Therefore the War Department is well 
within the truth when it reports to Con- 
gress that "in this respect the coast artil- 
lery militia fails to meet expectations. ,, 

There remains to be added only the fact 
that despite the fact that the Federal cash 

214 



THE A-B-C OF NATIONAL DEFENSE 

contribution to the States for militia sup- 
port amounted to $4,815,000 during the 
fiscal year 1914, "only 11 States had on 
hand at the time of the last annual inspec- 
tion one complete uniform (less shoes) 
for each enlisted man of the authorized 
minimum strength." 



?H£ Snd 



2I 5 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




011 399 624 9 

























9V 




